“If I … give you the tool and I tell you use this or else, that's not gonna work. If I tell you, I give you the tool and that tool says, I can do X, Y and Z and then you actually put it in production and it can do a quarter of X, a tenth of Y and a 50th of Z, I will fail there as well. What I need is the engineer to be able to see that I know the pain they see. That's what gets a builder really hungry. When they know that they can take the tool and they can mold it to their outcome.”
Context. Ramakrishnan is describing how Uber's platform team gets engineers to keep using a tool, after saying that adoption comes from letting people fail in a safe way.
Nikhil Ramakrishnan, AI Foundations & Developer Experience. Works on the developer platform and builds the tools he describes (Minion, DevPod), so he knows how they are used; an insider speaking at a vendor-run summit about his employer's own work, with no figures beyond a stated target.
How this was checked
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-07).
Exact match in whisper.srt near 12:08, including 'a quarter of X, a tenth of Y and a 50th of Z'. The captions drop the 'and' and differ elsewhere, so I confirmed on whisper only. The ellipsis after 'If I' marks omitted words.
How to cite this passage
Nikhil Ramakrishnan (Uber), “Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs”, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, 2026-05-07, at 12:08. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7G5EHDqQ1g Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/uber-tool-use-this-or-else-not-gonna-work-engineer-sees-pain-2026
Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a host question on whether Uber's builder-oriented engineering culture drives how fast it adopts AI. The sentence before it, on mandating AI use, is left out because the two passes hear it differently.
Context. Ramakrishnan is describing Minion, Uber's background-agent platform, and the engineers who get toil tickets, such as a vulnerability fix with a long validation loop, in the middle of product work.
Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a host question on how Uber picks use cases; just before, he says Uber goes strictly by developer-satisfaction data when developers cannot choose.
Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a question about Shepherd, which the host describes as Uber's platform for large-scale code changes such as migrations and upgrades. The recording is captioned 'Shepard' on the session page; both passes heard 'Shepherd'.
Uber