Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI
Source: TechCrunch
AI Coding at Spotify
Spotify’s co‑CEO Gustav Söderström said on the company’s fourth‑quarter earnings call that the “best developers at the company have not written a single line of code since December.” The comment highlighted how Spotify is using AI to accelerate development across the organization.
New Features Launched in 2025‑2026
Spotify shipped more than 50 new features and changes to its streaming app throughout 2025. Recent launches include:
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Prompted Playlists – an AI‑powered feature that creates playlists based on user prompts.
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Page Match – a tool for audiobooks that matches pages to audio content.
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About This Song – lets listeners explore the story behind the track they’re hearing.
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Internal AI System “Honk”
Spotify engineers use an internal system called Honk to speed up coding and product velocity. Honk leverages generative AI, specifically Claude Code, to enable:
- Remote, real‑time code deployment.
- Bug fixes or feature additions via simple natural‑language commands.
“An engineer on their morning commute can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app, and receive a new version of the app on Slack before arriving at the office,” Söderström explained.
Spotify credits Honk with dramatically accelerating development and deployment cycles.
Building a Unique Music Dataset
Söderström emphasized that Spotify is creating a proprietary dataset that other large language models (LLMs) cannot easily replicate. Music‑related queries often lack a single factual answer, making user‑generated preferences valuable. Examples include:
- Workout music preferences vary by geography (e.g., hip‑hop in the U.S., EDM in parts of Europe, heavy metal in Scandinavia).
- The dataset captures these nuanced, culturally specific tastes at scale.
“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,” he noted.
AI‑Generated Music Policy
When asked about AI‑generated music, Spotify explained that it allows artists and labels to indicate in a track’s metadata how the song was created. The platform continues to police AI‑generated content for spam.
- Learn more about the metadata labeling requirement:
Spotify updates AI policy to label tracks, cut down on spam