Spotify's Best Developers Haven't Written Code Since December — What Their Earnings Call Tells Us About AI-Led Development
I wanted to preserve this one for posterity as it was the first time I'd heard someone talking about this topic in an earnings call.
During the Spotify Q4 2025 earnings call (held on February 10, 2026), Co-CEO and CTO Gustav Söderström made waves by claiming that the company's most senior developers have effectively transitioned away from manual coding.
The core of his message was that Spotify is moving from "AI-assisted" to "AI-led" development. Below are the key highlights from his remarks regarding their engineering transition.
Key Remarks: The End of Manual Coding
Söderström explicitly stated that many of Spotify's top engineers are no longer "writing" code in the traditional sense:
"The best developers we had, they actually say that they have not written a single line of code since December. They actually only generate code and supervise it."
How the Workflow Works: "Honk" and Claude Code
He described a new paradigm where engineers act as architects and editors rather than manual labourers. The technical backbone of this shift is an internal system called "Honk," which integrates Claude Code directly into their infrastructure.
Söderström provided a striking example of what he called the "commute workflow":
"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 arrived at the office."
On the system's standing within the industry:
"We call the system internally Honk, and we have been told by key AI partners that our work here is industry leading."
Impact on Product Velocity
Spotify credited this AI-native environment for a massive surge in shipping speed. In 2025, the company rolled out over 50 new features. The financial results speak for themselves: €701 million operating income, €4.5 billion revenue growing 13% year-over-year, and premium subscribers increasing 10% to 290 million.
The Cultural Shift
Söderström was candid about the difficulty of this transition, noting that it requires a fundamental rethink of how tech companies operate. He stated that "engineering practices, product practices, and design practices will change" as a result of agentic AI capabilities becoming standard in software development.
This is a significant moment. When a public company's CTO stands up on an earnings call and tells investors that their best engineers have stopped writing code — and frames it as a competitive advantage — it signals something broader about where the industry is heading.
The full Q4 2025 earnings report is available on the Spotify Newsroom, and the full earnings call transcript is available via Motley Fool.
