Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI

Has AI coding reached its peak? That seems to be the case for Spotify at least, which they shared this week his call in the fourth quarter that the company’s best developers “haven’t written a single line of code since December.” That statement, from Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström, came with some comments about how the company is using AI to accelerate development.

Notably, Spotify has shown that it has sent 50 new products and changes to its software update in 2025. And, recently, it has released more, such as AI-powered. Recommended Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About the Songwhich were all introduced within the last few weeks.

At Spotify, engineers are using an internal system called “Honk” to speed up downloads and content speeds, the company told analysts on a call. The system allows for things like remote control, virtual reality using generative AI, specifically Claude Code.

“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And when Claude finishes the project, the engineer gets a new app, and pushes it to Slack on their phone, so they can put it together for production, before they all come to the office.”

Spotify credited the system with helping to speed up recording and delivery “a lot.”

“We foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning,” said Söderström.

The manager also pointed out Spotify’s ability to create unique tools that other LLMs could not sell, as they do with other online resources, such as Wikipedia. That’s because there isn’t always a real answer to music-related questions, he said.

For example, if you ask what is exercise music, you will get different answers from different people, sometimes depending on their location. Americans tend to love all hip-hop, although millions love death metal. And while many Europeans may work in EDM, many Scandinavians prefer heavy metal.

“This is a dataset that we’re building right now that no one is really building. It doesn’t exist yet. And we’re seeing this improve every time we update our models,” Söderström said.

Researchers on the phone also questioned Spotify’s approach to AI-generated music. The company explained that it allows artists and writers to show in track metadata how this song was created but it is still monitoring the spam platform.