Spotify says its best engineers no longer write code as AI takes over

Spotify, in its recent remarks on artificial intelligence, highlights a turning point inside the company, with some of its top engineers being replaced by AI. During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Co-CEO Gustav Söderström revealed that "several Spotify engineers have not written a single line of code since December," highlighting the embedment of AI coding tools in its workflow.

According to a recent report, in 2025 Spotify introduced more than 50 new features and updates to its streaming app. Whereas, the new year started off with several interesting launches integrated with AI, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks and About This Song.

A new shift this year in technology took place after the launch of a new AI system, “Honk”, which uses generative AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude Code, to accelerate coding and deployment. Söderström described how engineers can send instructions to Claude via Slack, even while commuting, to fix bugs or add features. The AI completes the task and pushes an updated version of the app back for review before it goes live.

Spotify says that this system has tremendously increased development speed and views it as just the beginning of AI-driven software engineering.

Notably, Söderström noted that music preferences are subjective and vary by region and taste, making them harder to commoditise than factual datasets used by large language models.

Analysts similarly asked the firm about AI-generated content, to which the firm said they could use metadata to identify the type of creation, though the firm continues to monitor the website for any cases of spam and misuse.