Spotify Co-CEO: Top developers no longer write code thanks to AI

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This statement by Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström is causing discussion: "When I talk to my most experienced engineers, the best developers we've had, they say they haven't written a single line of code since December. They just generate code and monitor it." The statement from the analyst conference on the latest business figures is met with mixed reactions online: while some are fascinated by how strongly Spotify has driven the AI transformation within its company, which Söderström likely intended to promote, others take offense. Critics comment that this is a loss of control, not a quality feature.

In fact, control in software development at Spotify is said to have become more important than ever. With his statement at the analyst conference (transcript at Seekingalpha), Söderström pointed to a fundamental change in the way of working. And not without reason did he likely emphasize that it is precisely the best developers who no longer write code.

From player to coach

In this new order, AI takes over active programming, while developers – to compare it to the sport of soccer – increasingly become coaches instead of players. Victory or defeat is decided by strategy and preparation of the players, not by the ability to move the ball themselves across the field. And the coach must keep an eye on everything during the game. With substitutions and calls, they influence the course of the game. In terms of development, this would be feedback to the AI, setting priorities and sequences, and evaluating its performance. Even before the use of agentic AI, experienced developers made architectural decisions – with AI, the focus shifts even more.

For this purpose, Spotify uses a self-developed system called "Honk" to accelerate coding and product development. Claude Code from Anthropic is used as the technical basis for this. Developers can request changes to the app via Slack from their smartphones and add bug fixes or new features, for example. They receive the result back as a test version and provide feedback to the AI until the desired level of maturity is reached.

Extensive infrastructure built

Spotify's success with AI-assisted development is not primarily based on Claude Code itself, but on years of infrastructure work. Since 2020, Spotify has been using "Backstage," a portal that serves as a central point of contact. Everyone in the company can track there which team is responsible for which code and what the dependencies between different components look like.

Building on this, Spotify developed "Fleet Management" starting in 2022 – a framework that can perform code changes across hundreds or thousands of repositories simultaneously. The integration of the Claude Agent SDK only took place in July 2025.

Spotify Co-CEO: Just the beginning

Spotify belongs to a small elite: According to a Deloitte study from 2025, only 11 percent of organizations use Agentic AI in production. 30 percent are exploring the topic, 38 percent are conducting pilot projects.

Söderström does not see the current state as an endpoint: "We don't see this as the end of development in AI, but only the beginning." Spotify plans further AI integration into development processes. However, it remains unclear whether this will not ultimately affect the job security of developers. Savings could be made here, especially on junior staff who lack the experience to control AI. In Germany, such a trend is already emerging. Critics, meanwhile, fear that developers will increasingly lose their practical coding skills.

(mki)