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Spotify Says Top Engineers Haven’t Written Code Since December as Honk AI Takes Over

A Claude Code–powered pipeline is accelerating releases by moving developers into supervisory roles.

Overview

  • Spotify’s Honk system now generates, tests, and can push code in real time, with engineers approving or rejecting changes.
  • In a Slack-based ChatOps flow, an engineer can request a bug fix or feature during a commute and receive a ready-to-merge app build on their phone.
  • The AI-driven workflow helped Spotify ship more than 50 app updates in 2025 and recently launch Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song.
  • Executives say they are building a proprietary music dataset that improves with retraining and is tailored to opinion-based queries.
  • Spotify allows artists and labels to note AI involvement in track metadata and says it continues to police AI-generated spam, as peers report rising shares of AI-written code.