New Delhi: Spotify has made a bold claim about how it now builds its app. During a recent earnings call, the company said artificial intelligence has taken over much of its coding work. The detail was first reported by TechCrunch, which highlighted comments from Spotify’s leadership that raised eyebrows across the tech industry.
The idea that senior engineers are no longer typing code line by line feels strange. But Spotify says that is exactly what is happening.
Spotify says AI now writes the code
According to TechCrunch, Spotify co CEO Gustav Söderström said the company’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December.” He described an internal AI system that is “accelerating” development.
That system is called “Honk.” It runs on Claude Code and works through Slack. Söderström explained that engineers can message Claude Code on Slack to create a new feature or fix a bug. The AI then updates the app and sends the new version to the engineer’s phone via Slack. The human developer reviews it and merges the AI code into production.
Spotify says this setup is speeding up development “tremendously.”
Bigger AI plans inside Spotify
This is not just about coding speed. Söderström hinted at larger ambitions. He spoke about building what he described as a large music knowledge dataset.
“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 said on the call. “And we see it improving every time we retrain our models.”
The company also rolled out more than 50 features and tweaks last year, according to the earnings discussion. An in app bookstore is expected later this year as well.
Price hikes and user reactions
The timing is interesting. Just last month, Spotify increased its US Premium Individual price to 12.99 US dollars per month. At the time, Spotify said the hike would help it “keep delivering a great experience.” Now, with AI driving much of the development, some users may question what that experience really means.
Industry watchers I spoke to said this signals a shift in how telecom and tech firms manage product teams. AI tools are no longer just helping with small tasks. They are shaping the full app pipeline.