Spotify’s top engineers aren’t losing jobs to AI, says CXO — here’s what they’re doing instead

The future of work may have arrived sooner than expected. This is already evident at Spotify, where the most experienced software engineers have not written a single line of code in months, according to a senior executive.

All thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), as it is increasingly taking over routine programming tasks and reshaping how the streaming company builds and updates its products.

Speaking at Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call, co-chief executive officer Gustav Soderstrom noted that AI is now deeply embedded in the music platform’s engineering workflow, which is tasked with generating and deploying software with minimal human coding.

“Our most experienced developers have not written a single line of code since December,” Soderstrom said during the earnings call.

What are these engineers doing instead?

At Spotify, top engineers are using an internal system called “Honk” to speed up software development and improve product velocity, the company told analysts on the call. The platform uses generative AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude Code, along with real-time code-deployment tools that allow code to be generated, tested, and rolled out remotely.

Meanwhile, Spotify’s engineers increasingly act as supervisors of the AI system, focusing on guiding, reviewing and refining the system’s output rather than writing code themselves.

Instead of getting laid off, Spotify’s worker roles have simply shifted towards defining requirements, checking quality and making architectural decisions, while the AI handles much of the routine tasks.

“As a concrete example, 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,” Soderstrom said.

In the first two months of 2026, several tech companies have laid off mid- and senior-level employees due to AI integration into the workforce. These companies include Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and more.

How is this setup helping the company grow?

The company also said that this new approach has helped it build and launch products much faster. In 2025, Spotify rolled out more than 50 new features and updates, including AI-powered tools like Prompted Playlists, Page Match, which links physical books with their audiobooks, and “About This Song,” which offers listeners background and stories about the music they are playing.

The senior executive also highlighted that Spotify’s vast user data gives it a competitive edge for AI development. “This is a dataset that we are building right now that no one else is really building. It does not exist at this scale,” he said. “And we see it improving every time we retrain our models.”

Despite the dramatic shift, Soderstrom said the changes should be seen as an early stage of a much broader transformation rather than a final outcome. He suggested that AI will become even more deeply embedded in how software is designed, built, and maintained.