Spotify Developers Haven’t Written a ‘Single Line of Code Since December’ 2025
Engineers leverage a system called “Honk” to expedite coding and increase product velocity, enabling remote, real-time code deployment using generative AI.
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Outside of announcing a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million monthly active users, the Swedish audio streaming service is having its best developers do no code.
During the fourth-quarter earnings call earlier this week, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström shared that the company’s developers had “not written a single line of code since December.”
The comment came as the company is using AI to accelerate development, which includes shipping over 50 new features and changes to the app throughout 2025.
The recent rollouts include AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song.
Engineers as Editors, Not Coders
Internally, engineers are leveraging a system called “Honk” to expedite coding and increase product velocity, enabling remote, real-time code deployment using generative AI, specifically Claude Code.
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer 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.”
“We foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning,” Söderström added.
Today, developers simply describe their requirements, let AI generate the code, and review the output.
AI in Music
AI is transforming the music industry by enabling, composing, and mixing, with creators using it for tasks like stem separation, vocal cloning, and mastering.
“We consider ourselves the R&D department for the music industry. Our job is to understand new technologies quickly and capture their potential, which we’ve done time and again,” he said.
Having developed a proprietary dataset that other LLMs can not commoditize—unlike other online resources such as Wikipedia—executives noted that music-related queries do not always have clear-cut, factual answers.
Citing the example of a workout music requested by a diverse set being based on their geography, he 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 AI envelops industries, analysts seek clarity about Spotify’s approach to AI-generated music. The company explained that while it is allowing artists and labels to label AI usage in a song, it is still policing the platform for spam.
About 60 million people used AI to create music in 2024, according to the IMS Business Report 2025.
