Uber’s AI infra, from the inside

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What do developer tools look like inside of Uber, today? They are very different from what you would see at most places. For example, can you guess what service a system called DevPods, Code Inbox, Slate or Wisdom would be providing to engineers?
Today’s episode is a deepdive into the day-to-day tools of devs at Uber, our tour guide being on of Uber’s longest-tenured engineers: Uday Kiran Medisetty (x.com/udaykiran?lang=en). Uday is one of the few Distinguished Engineers at the company, and leads much of the work on agentic AI, today.
With Uday, we talk through how Uber’s developer infrastructure prepared it for AI agents. We look at the systems Uber built before generative AI and the new tools that connect agents to its code, internal services, and engineering knowledge. Uday explains how engineers use background agents, why tools like Slate make development (and bugfixing!) more efficient, and how code review is changing. We also cover Uber’s approach to token costs and how it measures productivity as the engineer’s role changes.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:48 Uday’s early days at Uber
05:40 Uber’s move to microservices
07:55 Uber’s engineering team, then and now
09:05 Developer tooling before AI
16:03 DevPods
19:28 Building for AI agents
29:27 MCP gateway
34:37 Agent Skills repo
38:46 The context graph and Cortana
47:54 PRD and ERD tool
50:45 Minion
54:46 Testing and code review with Bazel, Slate, and Capri
1:12:26 Edge Gateway, Shepherd, and Wisdom
1:21:33 The changing role of engineer and measuring productivity
1:30:40 Uday’s favorite new products
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-us…)
• Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO) (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/scaling-ube…)
• Inside Uber's move to the Cloud (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-move-t…)
• The Platform and Program Split at Uber (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/program-pla…)
• Hypergrowth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/high-growth…)
• How Uber Built its Observability Platform (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-bu…)
• How Uber is Measuring Engineering Productivity (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-eng-pr…)
• Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam (newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/developer-e…)
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