“ Right now, … the workflow for the developers has changed and is changing further. They're spending more and more time in planning and code review because there's so much more code being generated that they're being forced to do it. This probably isn't the favorite type of work that developers love doing, code review.” Ty Smith Principal Engineer, AI & Developer Productivity, Uber · Practitioner ,
Context. Smith is describing how developers' time at Uber is shifting as agents write more code.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 18:38 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025
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, 2026-11-04).
Around 17:40–18:38. The ellipsis replaces the false start 'the work --'. The rest matches. Speaker Ty Smith, as this is in his section of the talk.
“ … the issue is that these are activity metrics … These are not necessarily business outcomes. … when we start talking about the costs of this technology, … our CFO has asked me, what is the impact of this … I can't point him to diffs. I need to show him what's the impact on revenue. I'm sure you folks are dealing with the same problem. This is not necessarily a solved problem for us.” Anshu Chadha Director of Engineering, Dev Platform, Uber · Leader ,
Context. Chadha is describing the gap between the activity metrics Uber tracks for AI use and the business outcomes its CFO asks about.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 35:07 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
“ As soon as we made our agentic … available to developers, what we saw is 70 percent of the workloads that developers are pushing into the system were toil tasks. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is the accuracy of these tasks was much higher compared to the more ambiguous workloads. And it makes sense, right? Like the start and end state of some of these tasks, if you think about a library upgrade or a migration, is much more straightforward versus, say, building a brand new feature or an experience … that requires an experiment.” Anshu Chadha Director of Engineering, Dev Platform, Uber · Leader ,
Context. Chadha is describing what developers first sent to Uber's agentic system and why.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 06:47 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
“ what we found is by really focusing on this project, building a custom agent on top of our internal … we were able to get a much higher quality type of unit test output. And so at this point, we're seeing about 5,000 tests generated and merged per month around the company from this. And almost a 3x rate of quality versus something that would be generated from your typical generic agent.” Ty Smith Principal Engineer, AI & Developer Productivity, Uber · Practitioner ,
Context. Smith is describing Auto Cover, Uber's custom unit-test generation agent, and why Uber built it instead of using a general coding agent.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 24:45 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
“ So if you think about back in the good old days of 2022 and 2023, when GitHub co-pilot first came out, it was a pretty novel way of augmenting developments. … we saw about maybe a 10 to 15% bump in overall diff velocity. … but this by itself didn't push us in the direction that we've seen over the past, let's say, year, where the paradigm has shifted to peer programming, where you could hand off workloads that are running asynchronously.” Anshu Chadha Director of Engineering, Dev Platform, Uber · Leader ,
Context. Chadha is describing what Uber measured when GitHub Copilot arrived and how the work has shifted since.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 03:46 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
“ … speaking of costs, the cost of AI is too damn high. … since 2024, our costs have gone up at least 6x. … again, no question that it's had positive impact, but it's gone from something that I can self fund using my own budget to something that I need to ask permission from … the CFO.” Anshu Chadha Director of Engineering, Dev Platform, Uber · Leader ,
Context. Chadha is describing how the cost of AI tools at Uber has grown and what it changed about who approves the spending.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 35:56 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
“ I ran a demo session with some of my VPs, and in 24 minutes, I had four VPs land code for the first time in years. It was a pretty amazing experience. They were pretty satisfied by it, too. But our adoption for this technology has been relatively slow. It's been slower than I've expected, and part of it is because we're trying to have developers do something that they're so not used to. They're used to looking at code and generating from scratch, operating in their IDE, and we're telling them to take a risk by operating in a very different way.” Anshu Chadha Director of Engineering, Dev Platform, Uber · Leader ,
Context. Chadha is describing a demo of Uber's agentic tooling to VPs and why developer adoption has been slower than he expected.
Talk: Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit , The Pragmatic Engineer (YouTube) , March 10, 2026, at 32:45 .
[ Grade B ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page
Uber