Spotify’s co-CEO Gustav Söderström revealed during the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call that the company’s top engineers have not written a single line of code since December, underscoring a dramatic shift toward artificial intelligence-driven software development where internal systems like “Honk” and generative models such as Claude Code produce and deploy features with minimal human typing required. Instead of traditional coding, engineers at Spotify are using AI commands—sometimes issued via Slack on a mobile device—to generate, fix, and merge app code in real time, a model the company credits with helping it ship more than 50 new features in 2025, including AI-powered tools like Prompted Playlists and Page Match for audiobooks. Spotify leaders describe this as the beginning of a larger AI transformation that could fundamentally reshape engineering roles into review and supervisory positions as developer labor pivots toward guiding and optimizing AI outputs. At the same time, Spotify continues to grow its user base and revenue, touting increased productivity alongside these technological shifts while attracting both interest and debate about the future of coding as a craft and profession.
Sources
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/spotify-ceo-says-top-developers-havent-written-code-since-december-11001924
https://www.fastcompany.com/91493217/spotify-ai-coding-new-features-claude
Key Takeaways
• Spotify’s senior developers have effectively stopped manually writing code since December 2025, instead using AI systems to generate and deploy software features.
• The internal AI system “Honk” and Claude Code tools allow engineers to request updates and fixes through Slack, with AI producing code that developers then review and merge.
• This shift reflects a broader industry trend toward AI-assisted software development, prompting discussion about the evolving nature of engineering work and productivity gains.
In-Depth
At Spotify, traditional software development is undergoing a sweeping transformation driven by artificial intelligence that, for many companies, might have seemed futuristic just a few years ago. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Söderström made headlines by stating that Spotify’s “best developers” have not written a single line of code since December. This comment was not casual or offhand; rather it reflects a deliberate strategic embrace of AI tools to write, fix, and deploy application code. Rather than spending their days typing syntax into integrated development environments or debugging complex algorithms by hand, the engineers at the streaming giant now describe functionality they want and rely on internal systems to generate the corresponding code. Systems like “Honk,” coupled with Claude Code, are central to this shift. Engineers can issue commands through Slack—even while on a commute—and receive completed code that can immediately be merged into the main app build, often before the engineer even arrives at the office. Spotify executives have credited these AI systems with speeding development and enabling the company to roll out more than 50 new features and changes over the course of 2025, including innovative AI-focused offerings such as Prompted Playlists and Page Match for audiobooks. These capabilities illustrate that the use of AI in software development is not merely a theoretical advantage but something delivering real product velocity.
Spotify’s leaders portray this evolution as the beginning of a new era in which human engineers transition from being primarily coders to becoming editors, architects, and supervisors of AI-generated work. This change raises questions about the future of coding as a craft and profession, with proponents arguing that such tools free engineers to focus on higher-level design and problem solving, and critics warning that over-reliance on AI might erode deep technical skills and lead to quality issues. Amid these debates, Spotify’s results—including growth in revenue and users—suggest that for at least one major tech player, AI-driven workflows have delivered measurable productivity gains. As industry conversations continue about AI’s role in software engineering, Spotify’s latest shift stands as a high-profile case study in how quickly the landscape can change when a leading company decides to fully integrate generative AI into its development processes.