Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven't Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0180787992
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/02/13/1834228/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/
Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office. The system has helped Spotify ship more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song. Soderstrom credited the system with speeding up coding and deployment tremendously and called it "just the beginning" for AI development at Spotify. The company is building a unique music dataset that differs from factual resources like Wikipedia because music-related questions often lack single correct answers -- workout music preferences vary from American hip-hop to Scandinavian heavy metal.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/
Please don't (Score:3)
Please don't work during your morning commute. Especially if you're the one driving.
But almost as importantly, if your employer makes you come into the office then you should ONLY work while at the office. And they can go F themselves if they want you to work on your own time as well.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe I'm just naive* but - it's hard for me to imagine a competent developer willingly allowing new code to be "pushed to Slack" before they have a chance to run through the changes with their own eyes.
This doesn't pass the smell test.
* I realize this may be true regardless
Re: (Score:2)
It's Spotify, it doesn't have to work correctly or even at all. I'll worry when I hear about one of my financial institutions doing this.
Re: (Score:2)
Equifax has entered the chat...
Re: (Score:2)
> Maybe I'm just naive* but - it's hard for me to imagine a competent developer willingly allowing new code to be "pushed to Slack"
I didn't see the word "competent" in the article, so I'm guessing that explains their willingness to push this black-box code to prod. (And probably on a Friday at 6pm or so, just before they leave for a weekend trip.)
Re: (Score:2)
> (And probably on a Friday at 6pm or so, just before they leave for a weekend trip.)
Hey I think I used to work with one of those guys...
Many years ago, I worked with a Linux admin who would do that sort of crap all the freaking time . I remember one year he rebuilt our mail server, using Slackware rather than our standard Red Hat because "he wanted to learn Slackware" (his words, after the fact). He threw it together, then powered it up on his way out the door for a two-weeks-long ski trip in another country.
Oh, did I mention this was on December 23rd?
Guess what happened, and who had to fix
Re: (Score:2)
>> Maybe I'm just naive* but - it's hard for me to imagine a competent developer willingly allowing new code to be "pushed to Slack"
> I didn't see the word "competent" in the article, so I'm guessing that explains their willingness to push this black-box code to prod. (And probably on a Friday at 6pm or so, just before they leave for a weekend trip.)
Pardon me... I didn't RTFA. In this context, does "pushed to Slack" actually mean the same as "push this black-box code to prod"?!?!
The way I read TFS was that:
* Dev uses phone to tell some LLM to do something.
* LLM does the thing, if it can, and will send it down the build pipeline.
* That can take a while ("during their morning commute"), which is actually a big negative - iteration requires lots of waiting for the computer to do things.
* Later, the build may complete. If so, the dev can test out the new f
Re: (Score:2)
100% agree.
However, I don't have a commute (WFH) and I don't really work even when I'm 'working', so what I'd appreciate would be some tips on gracefully reducing my productivity even further.
Driving?? (Score:2)
Driving? Like, a car? Why drive when you can pay two bucks for someone else to do it for you, and not worry about parking and car maintenance? What is this, the 20th century?
Is it true? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it true that AI code can't be copyrighted? If so, could spotify's code now be freeware? Semi trolling minds want to know.
Re: Is it true? (Score:2)
this story reminds me a company meeting where our new manager was introduced as having delivered his last two projects with zero bugs.
we all burst into laughter at the same time
followed by an awkward silience.
Re: (Score:2)
Trade secrets don't need to be copyrighted or copyrightable. If they don't publish their code, you can't read it.
Re: (Score:3)
> If they don't publish their code, you can't read it.
Ghidra would like a word with you.
Re: (Score:2)
Can't wait until Ghidra or some alternative goes full AI reverse compiler with meaningful results.
That will really take the gloves off.
Not the solution, not the problem (Score:1)
Well, yeah, the EXISTING ones. The top ones that have been there. I use AI to tell me how to do some obscure windows OS thing solely because I can vet the answer and verify it's correct. The same goes for talented coders. 20 years from now when nobody knows how to actually read and test code, it'll be a huge problem.
Re: (Score:2)
the way things are going it'll be a lot sooner than 20 years
Re: (Score:2)
Computer code --like all machines -- exists in the service of humans. That service remains flawed. Computers are ubiquitous, yet only a few percent of humans can write professional-grade code. OTOH nearly ALL humans can speak "poetically". Perhaps it's long overdue for humans to exit the "explicit" computer-code world and return to the poetic "Queens English" concrete noun/active verb etc. Let computer code talk to computer code natively. Thus flaw removed. Nekbeards/byte
Re: Not the solution, not the problem (Score:2)
It's "King's English" now.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's not and say we did.
AI Hype needs money (Score:4, Insightful)
This smells like bs to me. No way experienced developers are letting AI generate bug fixes or entirely new features using Slack to talk to AI on the way to work.
The only question here is: What are they selling?
Increased stock value?
AI Coding tool that management has a stock option for?
The simple fact is that AI can generate code, but has absolutely no understanding of anything. It's a very useful tool, but not as what this bs article is trying to sell it as.
Re: AI Hype needs money (Score:2)
Just another CEO spouting BS in order to promote his product and pump the share price. Any knowledge he has of the dev process has probably gone through 3 or 4 layers of management chinese whispers first.
Re: (Score:2)
I also wonder if their new definition of "best developers" is "developers who rely entirely on LLMs for coding."
With that semantic shift in place, they can hire new cheap greenies who rely entirely on LLMs because they can't code, and who do nothing but cause trouble for the actual competent developers who are manually fixing everything they break, and spin it to sound like progress.
Re: (Score:3)
The experiences reported in these articles are so utterly unlike the ones I have using AI to generate code. It HAS gotten better in the last year, but it is still no where near this capable, for me.
If I give it too many requirements at once, it completely fails and often damages the code files significantly, and I have to refresh from backup.
If I give it smaller prompts in a series, doing some testing myself between prompts, there is usually something I need to fix manually. And if I don't, and just let i
Re: (Score:2)
> You tell it what is wrong and it shuffles a lot of code around and says "there, fixed" and it is still doing exactly what it did wrong before.
Copilot often does this when it gets an image wrong and you correct it. It'll get confused and after it gets confused it never gets un-confused- it just gets worse and worse, recognizing the error and apologizing every step of the way as it continues to make it worse and worse. Like, WTF?
The frustrating part is that it'll often start out creating almost exactly what I want but as you modify or give it corrections, instead of fixing the image, it just progressively wrecks it bit by bit.
At that point I often
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure if you used Spotify level money to have your own AI cluster trained on your own code, it would have been a much different experience.
The rest of us won't get similar results.
Re: (Score:2)
> If I give it too many requirements at once, it completely fails
Same experience here, but the trick is knowing what 'too many requirements' consists of. The modern agents (see Google's Antigravity for an example) make a plan beforehand that you review and approve. You can make adjustments and tell it to break the implementation out into incremental phases so things don't go awry.
Re: (Score:2)
These kinds of AI fluff pieces are all about trying to assuage their investors' fears. Don't worry, it seems to say: we're at the cutting edge, and no we won't be replaced by a vibe-coded app anytime soon. It could be true, it could be all made up, but it doesn't matter as long as their shareholders feel good.
Re: (Score:2)
> The only question here is: What are they selling? Increased stock value?
From what I have observed in recent years, C-level people believe that their company will profit greatly from using LLM-based services that they pay other companies for . And when their stock value drops, they find out too late that any potential upside of their use of such services would also apply to any competitor, to the point where mundane SaaS-services can be vibe-coded by anyone, accepting the same lower quality standards they introduced by using LLM-generated code.
But to the question what are they s
Re: (Score:2)
Or Spotify has simply laid off their best developers and replaced them with AI.
Or Spotify has gone to crap and no one gives a damn because Spotify blames all their problems on Apple Music Monopoly.
Or Spotify is trying to cash in on AI hype money while they still can.
Or Spotify's developers were on vacation since December. They're in Europe, so they get like 2 months of vacation, right?
Or Spotify just hasn't done anything that requires code changes in 2 months. The backend systems are mature and the APIs wor
Spotify = worst company to work for (Score:3)
> Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office.
This makes Spotify the most awful workplace on the planet for suggesting (even if not demanding), that employees should be working during commute.
But also, this makes it the most poorly managed software shop. They're expecting employees to do away with being serious, and carelessly push updates "from Slack during commute". AI apart, you'd think he wants his engineers to at least pay attention to what they're doing. No way this attitude can end up well for the product.
why commute? (Score:3)
If you can do all of your work while commuting then why commute at all? Obviously does not matter where you sit.
A Bubble Is In A Trouble... (Score:2)
...so all guns are out and blazing. Propaganda is more aggressive with every passing moment.
Because so many bosses will have to answer very hard questions about vast quantities of money once it bursts.
It can and will be worse.
That explains it (Score:2)
Oh so that's why Spotify stopped working and some of the features disappeared. Awesome, I expect the next revision to just be a big ol' Play button with no other interface at all.
That sounds depressing (Score:2)
If I was one of the best devs, I wouldnâ(TM)t want to be regulated to vibe coding.
Maybe I just weird in that I actually enjoy solving problems and trying to think of the way things are put together?
Every threat actor now aiming for slack (Score:2)
If your AI can act on instructions given in slack, update code in source control, and then compile/deploy that code you just opened a whole can of worms. If I were a threat actor I would 100% be aiming to try and compromise their slack. Just tell the AI to introduce these few lines of code into the build... Or add this feature... It sounds like a security nightmare to me.
Their best developers aren't writing code (Score:1)
So only the worst ones are!
Well, considering the current Spotify client... (Score:1)
...it can't get much worse.
November (Score:2)
I haven't written a line of code since November...so does that make me better than Spotify's best developers?
Yuk (Score:2)
But as a developer, writing code, making it work, creating something, is actually the whole fun and love of development.
Guess who'll be kicked to the curb real soon (Score:3)
and they won't get a Honkin' big severance either
Re: (Score:2)
> and they won't get a Honkin' big severance either
Some thought they were honkin' Bobo.
Turns out Bobo was THE new hire.
Re: Guess who'll be kicked to the curb real soon (Score:3, Interesting)
Until they release a breaking bug on their morning commute, and some people on the bus suddenly lose their Spotify. Then said developer has no idea what went wrong, likely for hours or even days, while the AI keeps hallucinating fixes that don't work, as both it and the developers have no idea what they're actually doing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's fine, let Spotify show the world how it goes when you de-skill a team.
It's a mostly finished product now anyway, this is probably more telling that no new client of theirs has demanded something that their cookie cutter team didn't have a template for already.