Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström announced during the company's fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call that its best developers have not manually written a single line of code since December. The statement reflects a fundamental shift in how the streaming giant operates, with engineers now describing what they want built, letting AI generate the code, and reviewing the output.
The transition is powered by an internal system called Honk, built on Anthropic's Claude Code, which enables remote, real-time code deployment through generative AI. According to Söderström, a Spotify engineer on their morning commute can instruct Claude via Slack on their phone to fix a bug in the iOS app and receive a working build to merge into production before even arriving at the office. The system has significantly accelerated product velocity: Spotify shipped more than 50 new features and changes throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song. The company also recorded a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, bringing its total to 751 million monthly active users.
Spotify began rebuilding its internal systems approximately 18 months ago to create what it describes as an AI-native development environment, anticipating that software development would increasingly be driven by prompting and orchestration rather than manual implementation. Söderström emphasised that engineers now function as architects and editors rather than coders, with the bottleneck having shifted from coding capacity to human judgement, and stated that the company is determined to lead this transformation.
Sources:
1.
Sarah Perez
2.
TOI Tech Desk
3.
MITSloan ME Editorial
