Has AI coding hit a tipping point? At least at Spotify, it appears so. During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Spotify said that its top developers “have not written a single line of code since December.” The remark, made by co-CEO Gustav Söderström, came as part of a broader discussion about how the company is using AI to accelerate development.

 

The company noted that it shipped more than 50 new features and updates to its streaming app throughout 2025. In recent weeks alone, it introduced AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song.

 

Engineers at Spotify are using an internal system called “Honk” to boost coding speed and product velocity. According to executives, the system enables remote, real-time code deployment through generative AI tools, including Claude Code.

 

“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute can use Slack on their phone to tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “Once Claude completes the task, a new version of the app is pushed back to the engineer via Slack, allowing it to be merged into production before they even arrive at the office.”

 

Spotify said the system has dramatically accelerated both coding and deployment.

 

“We see this as just the beginning of AI-driven development, not the end,” Söderström added.

 

He also highlighted Spotify’s efforts to build a unique dataset around music preferences—one that large language models cannot easily commoditize in the way they can general knowledge sources like Wikipedia. Unlike factual queries, music-related questions often don’t have a single correct answer and vary by geography and personal taste.

 

For example, workout music preferences differ widely: many Americans gravitate toward hip-hop, some toward death metal, while parts of Europe favor EDM and many Scandinavians prefer heavy metal.

 

“This is a dataset we’re building at a scale that doesn’t really exist elsewhere,” Söderström said. “And it improves each time we retrain our models.”

 

During the call, analysts also asked about Spotify’s stance on AI-generated music. The company said it allows artists and labels to disclose in a track’s metadata how a song was created, while continuing to monitor the platform for spam.