Why Spotify’s developers haven’t written new code in more than a month

Spotify’s most senior engineers don’t type code anymore. In fact, they have not written a single line of code since December, co-CEO Gustav Söderström revealed during a recent earnings call.

It’s not that they’ve stopped working. Instead, through a combination of Claude Code and Honk (a specialized internal system at Spotify), the company’s engineers can now develop new features simply through Slack.

“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cellphone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström told analysts on the company’s February 10 earnings call.

“And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”

Söderström said the new AI-fueled developments—which he traced to the December release of Antropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 within Claude Code—are “just the beginning” in terms of how Spotify will deploy the tech to build new features.

The company has been on a big push for new user tools, adding more than 50 features in 2025, most of which launched over the past few weeks. Söderström credits the combination of Claude Code and Honk with “speeding us up tremendously,” noting that it’s changed how developers operate.

“Certainly I spent my entire vacation coding rather than being on holiday, and I think most people in tech did,” Söderström said.

He isn’t alone. In a post on X in late January, Boris Cherny, head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, shared that he hadn’t written any code in more than two months, noting that “pretty much 100%” of the company’s code is AI-generated.

At Davos last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that a year from now AI will be handling most or all software engineering work from start to finish. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event, Business Insider reported.

That timeline is looking increasingly realistic given that Spotify is just one example. Pinterest is another. On the company’s February 12 earnings call, CEO Bill Ready revealed that roughly half of Pinterest’s new code is now AI-generated.

Even as AI does the lion’s share of coding, Söderström said developers are focused on learning quickly and refining their approach. “If this was the end of the change, you could say ‘This is what happened, now let us retool for this,’” Söderström explained. “The tricky thing is that we are in the middle of the change, so you also have to be very agile.”

Reacting to news of Söderström’s AI bullishness, some professional developers seized the opportunity to get their digs in. “It’s true,” Epic Games programmer Ryan Fleury wrote on X. “In fact, I was under the impression that Spotify’s best developers hadn’t written a line of code since 2014.”