Top AI Product

If you’ve been anywhere near tech Twitter, [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994003), or [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/) this past week, you’ve probably seen the quote that lit everyone on fire. During Spotify’s [Q4 2025 earnings call](https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-02-10/spotify-q4-2025-earnings/), co-CEO Gustav Söderström casually dropped that the company’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December.” The reason? An internal AI coding platform called Honk.

Yeah, the name is funny. The system is not.

Honk is built on top of Anthropic’s Claude — specifically [Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code) and the Claude Agent SDK — and it’s deeply integrated into Spotify’s existing workflow through Slack. The pitch is wild but surprisingly practical: an engineer on their morning commute can open Slack on their phone, tell Claude to fix a bug or add a feature to the iOS app, and by the time they get to the office, a testable build is waiting for them. No laptop needed. No IDE. Just a Slack message and a code review when you sit down with your coffee.

Spotify has already [merged over 1,500 AI-generated pull requests](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/11/spotifys-background-coding-agent-part-1) across hundreds of repositories using this setup. They’ve documented the whole journey in a three-part engineering blog series covering [context engineering](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/11/context-engineering-background-coding-agents-part-2) and [feedback loops](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/12/feedback-loops-background-coding-agents-part-3). It’s actually a solid read if you want to understand the architecture behind it.

The reaction online has been… intense. The story broke on [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/) and got picked up by [Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/91493217/spotify-ai-coding-new-features-claude), [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-ai-honk-tool-derivative-works-licensing/), and [Slashdot](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). Multiple threads on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009057) blew up, and on Reddit it racked up over 14,000 upvotes with thousands of comments — mostly skeptical developers calling it everything from “corporate delusion” to “the beginning of the end.” Which is fair. That headline is designed to provoke.

But here’s the thing people miss when they react to the soundbite: Spotify isn’t saying engineers are useless. They’re saying the best ones shifted from typing code to orchestrating AI agents. The engineers still review every PR. They still make architectural decisions. They’re just doing it from their phones while commuting, which — love it or hate it — is a pretty compelling workflow if it actually holds up at scale. Spotify claims they shipped over 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists and Page Match for audiobooks.

Whether Honk represents the future of software development or just a well-packaged earnings call talking point is still very much up for debate. But the fact that it’s had the entire dev community arguing for two straight weeks tells you something. This isn’t just hype. It’s the kind of shift that makes people uncomfortable precisely because it might actually work.