Spotify’s top developers have not written a single line of code since December, relying instead on AI to handle coding tasks, a company executive revealed during a recent earnings call.
According to a TechCrunch report, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström told analysts that engineers at the company are using an internal system called ‘Honk’, powered by Claude Code, to accelerate development. The system allows for remote, real-time code deployment using generative AI.
In the earnings call, Söderström described an engineer on their morning commute using Slack on their phone to ask Claude to fix a bug or add a feature to the iOS app. Once completed, a new version of the app is pushed to the engineer for approval, all before they reach the office.
The company credited the system with speeding up coding “tremendously,” states the TechCrunch report. Spotify shipped more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists and other recent additions.
Söderström also noted in the call that the company is building a unique dataset for music-related queries that cannot be commoditised by other large language models, as answers to questions like “what is workout music?” vary by geography and personal taste, states the report.
Regarding AI-generated music, Spotify stated that it allows artists and labels to indicate in metadata how a song was created, while continuing to police the platform for spam, further states the report.