Spotify Engineers Stop Writing Code—AI Does It All Now

Spotify is flipping the script on software development. According to co-CEO Gustav Söderström, the company’s most skilled engineers haven’t manually written a single line of code since December. That’s not a bug—it’s the new feature.

Speaking during Spotify’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Söderström revealed how AI coding tools have completely transformed the company’s development workflow. The streaming giant isn’t just dabbling in automation—they’ve built an entire internal system called “Honk” that’s pushing code from idea to production faster than ever before.

The results are staggering. Spotify shipped over 50 new features and changes to its app in 2025 alone. In just the past few weeks, they’ve rolled out AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song—all leveraging artificial intelligence at their core.

But here’s where it gets wild: Spotify’s engineers aren’t even sitting at desks to deploy this code anymore. Using Claude Code through their Honk system, developers can initiate complex coding tasks from anywhere—including their morning commute.

“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström explained. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”

This isn’t just convenience—it’s a fundamental reimagining of how software gets built. The traditional image of developers hunched over keyboards, meticulously typing out syntax, is becoming obsolete at Spotify. Instead, human engineers are becoming orchestrators, directing AI systems that handle the heavy lifting of actual code generation.

The speed gains are dramatic. Spotify credits this AI-first approach with accelerating coding and deployment “tremendously.” But Söderström made it clear this is just the beginning. “We foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning.”

What makes Spotify’s AI push particularly interesting is their focus on building proprietary datasets that other companies simply can’t replicate. While most AI systems can access commoditized information like Wikipedia, Spotify is training models on something far more nuanced: human music preferences and behaviors.

The company recognizes that music recommendations aren’t about finding factual answers—they’re about understanding subjective human taste. Ask what constitutes “workout music” and you’ll get wildly different responses depending on who you ask and where they live.

“Americans tend to prefer hip-hop overall, though millions prefer death metal. And while a number of Europeans would work out to EDM, many Scandinavians like heavy metal,” Söderström noted. “This is a dataset that we are building right now that no one else is really building. It does not exist at this scale. And we see it improving every time we retrain our models.”

This unique data advantage positions Spotify to build AI systems that understand the messy, subjective nature of human musical taste—something that generic language models struggle with. It’s not about finding the “right” answer; it’s about finding the right answer for each individual user.

The company is also navigating the complex waters of AI-generated music. Rather than banning the technology outright, Spotify has updated its policies to require artists and labels to indicate in a track’s metadata how the song was made. They’re still actively policing the platform for spam and low-quality content, but they’re not shutting the door on AI creativity entirely.

This balanced approach reflects a broader industry trend: companies are racing to integrate AI tools while figuring out the ethical and practical implications. Spotify’s strategy of building proprietary datasets while allowing AI-assisted creation suggests they see AI as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement for human creativity.

The implications extend far beyond Spotify. If one of the world’s largest streaming platforms can effectively eliminate manual coding for its top engineers, what does this mean for the broader software industry? Are we witnessing the beginning of a massive shift in how technology gets built?

For now, Spotify is doubling down on its AI-first strategy, betting that the ability to ship features faster and understand users more deeply will keep them ahead in the increasingly competitive streaming wars. Whether other tech giants follow suit remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the era of AI-assisted development isn’t coming—it’s already here, and Spotify is living in it.

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