Spotify VP Niklas Gustavsson says AI assists 73% of pull requests, sparking debate over platform reliability

Coincidentally, 3 out of the last 4 weeks I could not include a link to Spotify when releasing my podcast episode, b/f Spotify was down.

2x an outage in publishing the podcasts, 1x the complete web player down

Have not experienced such poor reliability from Spotify in forever

Anyone who uses the Spotify app knows this is insanely bearish on token maxxing AI engineering

@ClaudeDevs Everyone can tell

> have 10,000 employees > ship 4500 times per day > brag about it

Niklas keeps 5 to 10 Claude sessions running in tmux, one per git worktree, agents working in the background.

All of it inside a 20M+ line monorepo. He expected agents to struggle at that size, but it's worked well.

Watch the full interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DHZLw5653E

Spotify's migration codemods grew into thousands of lines of edge cases. Code has too much API surface for static rewrites. Early LLMs barely did better.

Adding a judge took PR success from ~25% to 80%.

@growing_daniel spotify is so fucking bad

their only job as a software product is to recommend delightful new non-obvious music in the same way tiktok's job is to recommend delightful new non-obvious reels

despite the space of songs being smaller by literally every measure they still fail

@growing_daniel They have zero new features. Nobody would notice if they rolled back to the version 5 years ago.

To be clear, I am not implying that Spotify's reliability problems are to do with eg Claude Code. But reliability seems to be far more problematic than before from my POV

Eg outage a month ago:

People who use Spotify, do you think your experience with the app has gotten better in the last 6 minutes?

All of this leans on verification, the single most important thing when agents are used and the place most companies underinvest

Spotify rebuilt their test automation around it so engineers can confidently guide and supervise agents, rather than manually execute repetitive tasks

@growing_daniel

@ClaudeDevs Product looks the same for the last 10 years. What are they deploying?

Outage #2 in the last 4 weeks, when the web player was down:

And outage #3 last week, unable to publish episodes again:

No status page from Spotify, no postmortems. Pure disappointment as a podcaster + paying customer

@growing_daniel opened app to confirm and dang it’s toast

I feel like shipping to prod 50, maybe 100 times a day is worth bragging about - but why in the world does your extremely well-established service need 4500 releases a day???

In what universe is shipping to prod 135,000 times a month a good thing? Can you honestly tell me with a straight face that even a quarter of those changes bring measurable value to your end users and thus to the company??

I can’t imagine generating that many COMMITS in a month let alone actual pushes to prod.

They must be paying an insane amount in CI/observability costs - or maybe not and that’s why reliability has tanked

@ClaudeDevs Are they deploying when a new song is added? 😭

@vikhyatk I genuinely want to know what is Spotify deploying at such frequency. (And betting on "you don't wanna know")

@JusBili @ClaudeDevs Update song list +5/-0

Commit to 19GB .json file

Only way I can imagine this commit volume.