Spotify Says AI Has Taken Over Much Of Its Software Development
Spotify has revealed that some of its most senior engineers have not written code in months, as artificial intelligence increasingly takes on core development work across the company.
The disclosure came during Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call, where co-CEO Gustav Söderström highlighted how AI tools are reshaping the company’s engineering workflows. Söderström said the company’s top developers have largely stepped away from manual coding since December, relying instead on internal AI systems to handle development tasks.
Internal AI System Drives Rapid Development
At the center of Spotify’s strategy is an internal platform known as “Honk,” which integrates generative AI to accelerate coding, testing, and deployment. The system is powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude Code model and allows engineers to deploy changes remotely and in real time.
Söderström described scenarios in which engineers can submit instructions through Slack on their phones while commuting. The AI system can then fix bugs or introduce new features – such as updates to Spotify’s iOS app – and return a ready-to-review version before the employee arrives at the office.
According to Söderström, the process dramatically shortens development cycles and enables engineers to focus more on oversight and product direction rather than writing code line by line.
AI Investment Comes Amid Price Increase
The comments arrive just weeks after Spotify raised its U.S. subscription price from $11.99 to $12.99, positioning the service among the more expensive mainstream music platforms. At the time, the company said the increase was necessary to continue improving the user experience.
Spotify rolled out more than 50 new features and updates last year, many of them powered by AI. While the company frames the technology as a productivity booster, the combination of higher prices and AI-driven development has drawn skepticism from some users, particularly those wary of automation shaping creative and technical decisions.
Job Security Questions Linger
Spotify executives emphasized that Honk is still evolving and that the company views AI adoption as an early-stage transformation rather than a finished solution. Söderström said the system is producing a unique internal dataset that improves as models are retrained.
However, the shift has renewed broader concerns about the future of engineering roles. With AI increasingly capable of generating and deploying production-ready code, questions remain about how many developers companies like Spotify will ultimately need.
Those concerns echo recent comments from Mustafa Suleyman, head of AI at Microsoft, who warned this week that artificial intelligence could displace a large share of white-collar jobs within the next 12 to 18 months.
As Spotify continues to lean into automation, the company’s experiment may offer an early glimpse into how AI could redefine software development – and the workforce behind it – across the tech industry.
