Short answer: Anis Bennaceur agrees with Uber. He found the biggest Cursor spenders were his bottom and top engineers, so Attention caps most people at a few hundred dollars extra on Claude while top people get unlimited spend.
Watch this answer from Episode 45 (starts at 16:51) · Episode 45 notes and transcript
From Episode 45: Your Pipeline Is Lying to You. This AI Fixes It After Every Sales Call, starting at 16:51.
Sam Nadler [16:51]: I thought this was topical more as a discussion between founders, but, Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months. It's been a topic of discussion for us in the last three months. We've had a couple weeks where we've had a few surprises, and we're we're also grappling with, like, we're we kind of lead an organization where we want our engineers to have pretty much full access, unlimited access, and just let them build. So, it's been a co topic of conversation in the past sixty days for us, and I would love to hear your thoughts, Anis.
Anis Bennaceur [17:25]: Yeah. I can start with a story, and then I can tell you how we're thinking about it today. But that does not shock me, and I totally agree with what Uber is doing here. So that's a bit of a hot take. The first thing is, I wanted to measure the productivity of our engineers. This was, by the way, in 2025. And so what I started doing was looking into their cursor tabs. Right? Like, how much they would actually commit in cursor using AI. And so I started looking into all the engineers. And I noticed something really interesting, right, which was the people who were actually spending the most money on AI on Cursor were either the bottom engineers or some of the top engineers and no one in the middle. And, obviously, it's very it makes a ton of sense. At the end of the day, the top engineers who have best judgment will do great things, and the bottom ones will just create a lot of slop. And so we end up having over here at attention this two by two matrix that's really simple. It's a, how good is your judgment, and b, how AI advanced you are.
Anis Bennaceur [18:32]: Right? And so if your judgment is really bad obviously, I mean, you're not gonna stay here for too long, but if your judgment is really bad and your AI build, it's one of the worst combinations ever because you're going to do a lot produce a lot of slop. You're going to make a lot of, like, poor decisions. You're going to go into a lot of the wrong directions and build stupid things and build another fifteenth dashboard that is completely useless and will have spent all that money for nothing. Whereas, like, if you have very good judgments and you're AI advanced, you're gonna build incredibly smart things. You're not gonna reinvent the wheel. You're you will actually just build the machine that builds the machine, and that's where we want the token usage to go. Right? And so in our case, it's a bit arbitrary and some people might hate it, but we capped everyone at, I believe, like a few hundreds of dollars additional to what they normally use in Claude. The top people, and that's purely subjective, we will actually give them unlimited spend on Claude, but everyone else is capped.
Anis Bennaceur [19:35]: Right?
