Spotify's Co-CEO says senior engineers only generate and supervise AI code now. The developer community is not convinced.
By LDS Team
February 19, 2026
On February 10, 2026, Spotify held its Q4 2025 earnings call. Financial results were solid -- 675 million premium subscribers, revenue up 16% year-over-year. But it wasn't the numbers that lit up the internet. It was a comment from Co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom about what happened over Christmas.
"When I speak to my most senior engineers, the best developers we had, they actually say that they have not written a single line of code since December," Soderstrom told analysts. "They actually only generate code and supervise it."
The quote traveled fast. Within 48 hours, it had 14,275 upvotes on Reddit's r/technology, with 2,377 comments that were overwhelmingly skeptical. Developers called it everything from "corporate delusion" to "the beginning of the end." The story was covered by TechCrunch, The Verge, Business Insider, and dozens of other outlets.
But buried beneath the headline is a more nuanced story -- one involving a real internal system, a detailed three-part engineering blog series, and a December breakthrough that Soderstrom described as "a singular event."
What Soderstrom Actually Said
The full context of his comments paints a different picture than the headline suggests.
He was responding to an analyst question about AI's impact on Spotify's engineering productivity. He started by describing Christmas 2025 as a turning point:
"Over Christmas, Christmas this year was an event. A singular event in terms of AI productivity. Certainly, I spent my entire vacation coding rather than being on holiday, and I think most people in tech did. A lot of things happened in December, including Opus 4.5 coming out with Claude Code, and we crossed the threshold where things just started working."
Three things stand out. First, Soderstrom is talking about a specific subset of engineers -- "my most senior engineers, the best developers we had" -- not all of Spotify's thousands of employees. Second, he is describing what they told him, not a company-wide mandate. And third, he credits a specific product -- Anthropic's Claude Code with the Opus 4.5 model -- as the catalyst.
He went further: "We are absolutely hell-bent on leading that change. But it will be painful for many companies because I think engineering practices, product practices, and design practices will change."
Worth noting: Soderstrom is not claiming developers are doing less work. He is saying the nature of the work has shifted from writing code to generating and reviewing it. The distinction matters -- and it is what most headlines missed.
Meet Honk
The claim is not coming out of nowhere. Spotify has been building toward this for over a year.
Internally, the system is called Honk. It is a background coding agent that lets Spotify engineers trigger AI-powered code changes from Slack, GitHub, or any tool connected via MCP (Model Context Protocol).
Here is how Soderstrom described it on the earnings call:
"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. 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 arrived at the office."
Honk is built on two foundations:
Fleet Management -- Spotify's pre-existing internal platform for running source-to-source code transformations across all of its repositories. Since mid-2024, roughly half of all Spotify pull requests were already automated by this system. It runs transformations as containerized jobs that automatically open PRs.
Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK -- Spotify initially tried open-source agents, then built their own agentic loop on top of LLM APIs. They eventually switched to Claude Code because their homegrown solution, as they described in their engineering blog, "required overly rigid instructions and struggled with complex, multistep edits."
Boris Cherny at Anthropic confirmed the collaboration: "Spotify built a large scale system that used Claude Agent SDK to merge thousands of PRs across hundreds of repositories."
How Spotify Got Here
The shift did not happen overnight. A quick look at the progression:
The Numbers Behind the Claim
Spotify published a detailed three-part engineering blog series about Honk in November-December 2025, months before the earnings call. The data they shared:
| Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total merged AI PRs | 1,500+ across hundreds of repositories |
| Time savings | 60-90% compared to writing code manually |
| Automated PRs (Fleet Management) | ~50% of all Spotify PRs since mid-2024 |
| Developer adoption | Hundreds of engineers actively using Honk |
| Integration points | Slack, GitHub Enterprise, MCP-connected tools |
| Underlying model | Claude Code (Anthropic) with Claude Agent SDK |
Worth noting: The 1,500+ figure covers the entire history of Honk through November 2025. The December "breakthrough" that Soderstrom described would be on top of this baseline. The 60-90% time savings figure comes from Spotify's own internal measurements, not an independent audit.
The Internet Had Opinions
When TechCrunch published "Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI" on February 12, the developer community responded with force.
The Reddit post on r/technology accumulated 14,275 upvotes and 2,377 comments. The reaction was overwhelmingly skeptical. Developers across platforms raised three specific concerns:
The supervision problem. If senior engineers are spending all their time reviewing AI-generated code instead of writing it, is that actually more productive? Reading and verifying code written by something else is often harder and slower than writing it yourself. Anyone who has done a code review knows this.
The selection bias. Soderstrom said his "most senior" engineers made this shift. These are people with decades of experience who can instantly spot bad code. What happens when less experienced engineers try the same approach without that instinct?
The maintenance question. AI-generated code that works today still needs to be maintained tomorrow. If nobody fully understands the code because a machine wrote it, technical debt could be accumulating invisibly across Spotify's codebase.
The Evidence That Suggests Otherwise
The skeptics have data on their side.
In July 2025, METR (an AI safety research organization) published the most rigorous study to date on AI-assisted coding productivity. The results were surprising.
| Study Detail | METR Finding |
|---|---|
| Design | Randomized controlled trial (RCT) |
| Participants | 16 experienced open-source developers |
| Repos | Large-scale projects (22,000+ stars, 1M+ lines of code) |
| Tasks | 246 issues (bug fixes, features, refactors) |
| AI tools used | Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet |
| Result | Developers were 19% slower with AI assistance |
| Perception | Developers believed AI made them 24% faster |
The perception gap is the most striking finding. Even after completing tasks measurably slower with AI, developers still reported feeling like they had been sped up. METR described this as a "substantial and persistent gap between perceived and actual performance."
And then there is Klarna. In 2024, the Swedish fintech company announced its AI assistant could handle the equivalent of 700 customer service roles. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski declared that AI could "do all of the jobs that we humans do." By May 2025, Klarna was hiring humans again. The reason, per Bloomberg: the AI-only approach led to "lower quality."
Worth noting: METR explicitly stated their study does not represent all software development work and that near-future AI could perform differently. The study used early-2025 models -- not the December 2025 tools Soderstrom described. But the core finding, that perceived AI productivity gains can diverge significantly from measured ones, is directly relevant to evaluating claims like Spotify's.
The Bigger Picture
Spotify is not alone in making aggressive claims about AI replacing traditional coding.
In April 2025, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke circulated a memo demanding that teams prove AI cannot do a task before requesting new headcount. The message was clear: AI is the default. Humans are the exception.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce have all made layoffs in early 2026 while simultaneously increasing AI investment. The pattern is consistent: fewer humans, more AI, and executives who describe it as inevitable progress.
But the Spotify claim is different in one important way. Most AI-replacing-workers stories are about customer service, content moderation, or routine data processing. Soderstrom is talking about the best software engineers at one of the world's most technically sophisticated companies. If even they have stopped writing code, the implication is that nobody is safe.
Or, alternatively, a Co-CEO is overstating what "some of my engineers told me over coffee" to impress Wall Street analysts on an earnings call.
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
The Bottom Line
Gustav Soderstrom said something true: the best AI coding tools got dramatically better in December 2025. He said something likely true: some of Spotify's top engineers have shifted from writing code to supervising AI-generated code. And he said something unverifiable: that this represents a genuine productivity breakthrough rather than a perception gap that rigorous studies have already documented.
Spotify's Honk system is real. The 1,500+ merged PRs are real. The infrastructure -- Fleet Management, Claude Agent SDK, MCP integration -- is sophisticated and well-documented in a three-part engineering blog series. This is not vaporware.
But the METR study is also real. Klarna's reversal is also real. And the 14,275 Reddit upvotes represent a developer community that has heard "AI will replace you" enough times to demand evidence beyond an earnings call quote.
The most honest reading of the Spotify story is this: AI coding tools have reached a point where the best engineers, working on the right kinds of tasks, with the right infrastructure, can genuinely use AI to do most of the mechanical work of programming. Whether that makes them more productive -- or just differently busy -- is a question that no earnings call can answer, and that the industry has barely begun to study seriously.
Sources
- Spotify Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript (Yahoo Finance / Motley Fool) (Feb 10, 2026)
- TechCrunch: Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI (Feb 12, 2026)
- Spotify Engineering Blog: 1,500+ PRs Later -- Background Coding Agent Part 1 (Nov 2025)
- Spotify Engineering Blog: Context Engineering -- Background Coding Agents Part 2 (Nov 2025)
- Spotify Engineering Blog: Feedback Loops -- Background Coding Agents Part 3 (Dec 2025)
- METR: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity (Jul 10, 2025)
- Reddit r/technology: Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December (Feb 12, 2026)
- Bloomberg: Klarna hiring humans again after AI approach led to lower quality (May 2025)
- Wikipedia: Tobias Lutke -- Shopify AI memo (Apr 2025)