Executives on Spotify’s Q4 2025 earnings call stated how AI is redefining engineering at the company, with senior developers no longer writing code and internal systems enabling end-to-end AI-driven software development.
Gustav Söderström, the Co-CEO and CTO, said that Spotify’s most senior engineers have fundamentally changed how they work.
“When I speak to my most senior engineers…they actually say that they haven’t written a single line of code since December. They actually only generate code and supervise it,” Söderström said.
He explained that engineers now describe what they want built, rely on AI systems to generate the code, and then review and approve the output. Writing code manually is no longer the primary activity.
He added that Spotify has built an internal system called Honk to support this workflow.
Through Honk, engineers can request changes directly from AI models using Slack, even while away from their desks.
“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. 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,” Söderström said.
He stated that Spotify began preparing for this shift roughly a year and a half ago by rebuilding internal systems for an AI-native development environment. The company anticipated a future in which software development would be driven primarily by prompting and orchestration rather than manual implementation.
According to Söderström, this operating model is materially increasing product velocity. Engineers can move from an idea to a working build in minutes, not days.
He said the result is a sharp increase in the amount of software Spotify can produce. Development output is no longer constrained by human typing speed or coding bandwidth.
Söderström stated that the bottleneck within engineering organisations is shifting from coding capacity to human judgment and product direction. The scarce resource becomes the deciding factor for what should be built, what matters, and what aligns with company priorities.
He added that engineers are increasingly acting as editors, architects, and supervisors rather than traditional coders. Their value lies in taste, prioritisation, and quality control.
Söderström said this transformation is still in its early stages and will continue to evolve as models improve. Engineering practices, product development processes, and organisational structures will continue to change.
Summing up Spotify’s stance, Söderström said, “We are absolutely hell-bent on leading that change.”
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