Spotify: Thanks to AI, our top developers haven't written a line of code in over a month

IT House, February 13 — According to foreign media TechCrunch today, Spotify revealed during its Q4 earnings call that the company’s top developers haven’t written a single line of code since December last year. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström stated that the company is accelerating its development process through AI.

The engineering team is using an internal system called “Honk” to improve coding and deployment efficiency. This system combines generative AI like Claude Code to enable real-time remote code generation and deployment.

Söderström said, “For example, engineers can instruct Claude via Slack on their phones during their morning commute to fix iOS app bugs or add features. Once done, the new version of the app is directly pushed to Slack, allowing engineers to go live before arriving at the office.”

Spotify claims that this system significantly speeds up development and deployment. Söderström added, “This is not the end, but just the beginning of AI-empowered development.”

He also pointed out that Spotify is accumulating unique music behavior data. Unlike publicly available knowledge sources like Wikipedia, music preferences have no standard answers. For example, choices for workout music vary by individual and even by region. Overall, American users prefer hip-hop, some favor death metal; many Europeans choose electronic dance music, while Scandinavians tend to prefer heavy metal. “Such large-scale datasets are currently unmatched by other companies, and each model training makes it more refined.”

According to IT House, Spotify further disclosed its views and measures regarding AI-generated music: creators can label the method of generation in metadata, and the platform will not hesitate to crack down on spam content.