Lummox (@Lummox_eth) “Uber gave 5,000 engineers access to Claude Code and burned $3.4 billion AI budge” — TopicDigg

Uber gave 5,000 engineers access to Claude Code and burned $3.4 billion AI budget in 4 months. A $599 Mac Mini M4 fixes that. One purchase, $3 per month in electricity, and nothing ever leaves your hardware. Heavy AI users pay $459 per month across Claude Code Max, ChatGPT Pro, Cursor and Copilot. That is $5,508 per year. The Mac Mini replaces 80% of that workload locally. Keep one $20 per month subscription for the hard 20%. Total cost drops to $23 per month. Ollama installs in 2 minutes, pulls Qwen 3.6 14B or DeepSeek R1 14B, and Claude Code connects directly via one environment variable. Same interface, zero API costs. The 32GB RAM model at $799 is the sweet spot. XDA Developers tested it in April 2026 and concluded productivity did not drop replacing Claude Pro.