A hot potato: Just one month after it announced a price hike for US subscribers, Spotify has revealed that the best developers at the company have not written a single line of code since December, leaving all the work to AI.
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström made the admission during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. Like every other chief executive, Söderström was praising AI's ability to accelerate development at the company.
Söderström said (via TechCrunch) that Spotify's top engineers are using an internal system called "Honk" to speed up coding and product development.
Honk allows engineers to, among other things, carry out remote, real-time code deployment using Claude Code-powered generative AI.
Credit: App Economy Insights
Söderström gave the example of an engineer on their morning commute using Slack on their phone to instruct Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app.
Once Claude completes the task, the engineer receives the new version of the app on their phone, so it can be merged with the production version.
Söderström said this can all be done before the engineer arrives at the office, which obviously sounds like something employees would love.
The CEO gushed that Honk is speeding up coding and development "tremendously." "We foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning," Söderström said.
"This is a dataset that we are building right now that no one else is really building. It does not exist at this scale," Söderström continued. "And we see it improving every time we retrain our models."
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Spotify raised its prices from $11.99 to $12.99 in the US last month, making it one of the priciest mainstream music subscription services. The company said at the time that the hike will enable it to keep "delivering a great experience."
Spotify rolled out over 50 features and tweaks last year, along with a ton of AI tools not everyone wants. Combined with the price hike, news that the technology is also writing the app's code is unlikely to be welcomed by many users.
There's also the unanswered question of what AI taking over so many tasks will mean for coders' jobs. It's likely that at some point, Spotify won't need as many of these workers when so much of the code is being generated.
The news ties into a warning from Mustafa Suleyman this week. Microsoft's AI chief believes AI will replace most white-collar jobs within the next 12 to 18 months.