Spotify engineers no longer code, company says — AI now does the heavy lifting

Spotify AI coding: Spotify has reached a new milestone in AI-driven development, according to co-CEO Gustav Söderström, the company’s top engineers “have not written a single line of code since December," as quoted in a report. Instead, the work is being handled by the streaming giant’s internal AI system, called “Honk,” which leverages generative AI and Anthropic’s Claude Code to accelerate coding and product deployment.

How Spotify’s AI System “Honk” Works

During Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Söderström explained how the system works in practice. Engineers can now, for example, instruct Claude on their morning commute via Slack to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app, as per a TechCrunch report. Once Claude completes the task, the updated app version is pushed back to the engineer, ready to merge into production before they even arrive at the office.

Also read: AI was supposed to replace these jobs — IBM is now hiring more of them

Spotify Launched 50+ New Features in 2025

Throughout 2025, Spotify shipped more than 50 new features and updates to its app, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and the recently launched About This Song feature. The company credits Honk with speeding up coding and deployment “tremendously.”

Spotify’s Unique Music Dataset Powers Smarter AI

Spotify is also building a unique dataset that other large language models cannot easily replicate. Music-related questions often have no single factual answer, what workout music someone prefers can vary by geography and taste, from hip-hop in the US to heavy metal in Scandinavia.

By training AI on this proprietary dataset, Spotify is creating models that improve with each retraining cycle, offering a competitive edge in personalization and recommendations.

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. And we see it improving every time we retrain our models,” as quoted by TechCrunch.

Also read: Quote of the day by Diogenes the Cynic: 'We have two ears and one tongue so that we would...' - lessons on active listening by Greek philosopher

AI-Generated Music: Metadata and Platform Policies

When analysts asked about AI-generated music, Spotify said it allows artists and labels to indicate in track metadata whether a song was AI-assisted while actively policing the platform for spam.

Spotify's Honk vs Competitors: Staying Ahead in AI Development

Honk represents a significant leap for Spotify, putting the company ahead of competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music, which are still exploring AI integration in engineering. By building an AI layer fine-tuned to its own codebase, standards, and architecture, as per a Techbuzz report.

FAQs

What is Spotify’s AI system “Honk”?
It’s an internal AI platform that uses Claude Code to handle coding and app updates.

Are Spotify engineers still writing code?
According to co-CEO Gustav Söderström, top engineers haven’t written a line of code since December.