Has AI coding reached a tipping point? That seems to be the case at least for Spotify, which shared this week during its fourth-quarter earnings call 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 alongside other comments about how the company is using artificial intelligence to accelerate growth.
It’s worth noting that Spotify pointed out that it’s shipping more than 50 new features and changes to its streaming app throughout 2025. And, more recently, it’s been rolling out more features like AI-powered playlists, Page Mapping for audiobooks, and About This Song, all of which rolled out in the past few weeks.
At Spotify, engineers use an internal system called “Honk” to speed up coding and product speed, the company told analysts. This system allows for things like real-time remote code development using genetic artificial intelligence, specifically Code Claude.
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on his morning commute from Slack to his mobile can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer gets a new version of the app, sent to them in Slack on their phone, so they can then merge it into production, all before they even get to the office.”
Spotify credited the system with helping to speed up coding and development “incredibly”.
“We predict that this will not be the end of the line in terms of the development of artificial intelligence, but only the beginning,” Söderström said.
The exec also touted Spotify’s ability to create a unique dataset that other LLMs couldn’t commercialize, the way other online resources like Wikipedia could. That’s because there isn’t always a real answer for music-related questions, he said.
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For example, if you were to ask what workout music is, you’d get different answers from different people, sometimes based on their geography. Americans tend to prefer hip-hop overall, although millions prefer death metal. And while many Europeans would do well with EDM, many Scandinavians like heavy metal.
“This is a dataset that we’re building right now that no one else is really building. It doesn’t exist at this scale. And we see it getting better every time we retrain our models,” Söderström noted.
Analysts on the call also asked about Spotify’s approach to AI-generated music. The company explained that it allows artists and labels to indicate in a track’s metadata how the song was created, but still monitors the platform for spam.
