Has AI coding reached a tipping point? At Spotify, the answer may already be yes. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Söderström said that the company’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December,” underscoring how deeply AI has been integrated into its engineering workflows.

The statement came alongside broader comments about how Spotify is leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate development cycles and increase product velocity. The streaming platform shipped more than 50 new features and updates throughout 2025, and in recent weeks alone rolled out AI-driven capabilities such as AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song.

Central to this transformation is an internal system called “Honk,” which Spotify engineers use to speed up coding and deployment. The system enables remote, real-time code generation and deployment using generative AI — specifically Claude Code, Söderström explained during the call.

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 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.

Spotify credited the system with accelerating both coding and deployment “tremendously.”

Looking ahead, Söderström made clear the company sees this as only the beginning of AI’s impact.

We foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning,

he said.

Beyond internal productivity gains, Spotify is also investing in proprietary data advantages. Söderström highlighted the company’s efforts to build a unique dataset around music preferences — something he argued cannot be commoditized by large language models in the same way as general knowledge sources like Wikipedia.

Because there is rarely a single factual answer to music-related questions — such as what qualifies as workout music — responses vary by taste and geography. Americans may lean toward hip-hop, millions prefer death metal, while parts of Europe favor EDM and Scandinavia shows a strong preference for heavy metal.

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,

Söderström noted.

Analysts on the call also pressed the company on AI-generated music. Spotify said it allows artists and labels to indicate in a track’s metadata how a song was created, while continuing to police the platform for spam and abuse.

Material by Iva Abadjievа

IMAGE: Spotify Newsroom – Stream On 2023