Spotify: AI is doing the heavy lifting for our coding now

According to the music streaming platform Spotify and its co-CEO Gustav Söderström, the company's best developers "have not written a single line of code since December.” Yet Spotify continues to roll out new features at the same pace, with more than 50 launches last year.

How are they doing this? During Spotify's fourth quarter earnings call this week, the company said its all thanks to AI.

Spotify engineers use an internal system known as "Honk," which helps speed up coding productivity with AI. Honk utilizes Anthropic's Claude Code to enable AI coding and remote, real-time deployment of the code, readying it for a production environment.

Spotify is hardly the only major company that now relies on AI for the majority of its coding. Anthropic itself used Claude to build its recently launched Claude Cowork tool, and leaders at Meta and Microsoft have said AI is taking on more and more coding work.

Söderström provided an example during the call of a developer telling Claude to fix a bug on their commute, the AI fixes the issue then creates a new version of the app, and it's ready for the engineer to push live when they get to the office. The Spotify CEO also believes this is just the beginning in terms of what AI can do for coding and development.

In other AI-related news discussed during the Spotify call, the company shared that its Large Language Model (LLM) has a unique dataset because music-related questions are often opinion-based and don't have a single correct answer. 

Spotify also clarified that while it allows AI-generated music on the platform, which will be labeled as such in the track's metadata, it still monitors the platform for AI-generated spam content.

In addition to AI news, Spotify credited its end-of-the-year Wrapped campaign with bringing in 38 million new users in Q4 alone. Spotify currently boasts a user base of 751 million monthly active users, with 290 million of them paying subscribers.