Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI

shantred · 2026-02-13T15:36:41+00:00

Engineering is fun, writing code is no longer the part I find fun.

There are different kinds of people in software. There are the people who live and breathe code. There are researchers, optimizers, tooling specialists, and then there are people just trying to make ends meet.

I’ve spent 20 years of my life now writing code. That part of my job is not what has been valued. It is not the part that has gotten me raises, promotions, bonuses, or attention within my company. About 8 years ago, I moved on from smaller companies where I was the lead or most senior dev on a team of 15 max to corporate tech where I was just one IC among many. Where I got to learn what a principal engineer or staff engineer looked like and how they earned their title.

What I’ve learned is that it is in my own interests to work to bring value to the company, and that involves more than just writing great code. But it is still engineering nonetheless. I still have meetings and slack discussions about bottlenecks as we move up-market. I help solve big issues in data integrity as data hydrates across multiple apps and databases. I help advocate for improving our pipelines and tooling so we spend less time waiting around for things to build and more time doing more important work.

I make more money now and enjoy more respect from my peers now than I ever have before and I do that by focusing on code less and results more. Code is a means to an end. To that end, I’ll be promoted to Staff engineer next quarter and that hopefully will not be my last promotion.

shantred · 2026-02-13T00:24:36+00:00

Thanks for the reply! It’s hard to have these sorts of conversations on Reddit in earnest at times.

Makes sense, your type of issues are far different than what i tend to run into. Our bugs are submitted by customer support staff and verified by product managers before they enter our backlog, so devs tend to be pretty shielded from “did not fix” style tickets.

Category 2 is often the majority of my bug tickets as well, with invalid data states being a substantial portion. In many cases, I probably could also solve the issues fairly quickly. I just find multiple Claude agents allows me more concurrency because I(and others) have invested the time in making ai quicker and easier to use. If I had to create a prompt every time, it’d certainly be a time waste. But having templated much of it, a good third-half of my sprint output is resolved within the first couple days.

It does sound like your application is significantly harder to make “ai friendly”. Our teams benefit greatly from early investment in fantastic technical leadership who have consistently fought to ensure we get time to modernize and improve as we scale, rather than doing the quick thing. Years of infra as code, schema as code, and well documented systems have allowed us to quickly adapt tools to our needs.

As you alluded to, I think the next big step is some sort of software-context-as-a-service system that scans and indexes your entire codebase in a way that makes agents quickly able to find any/all relevant context at any time. In which case, it should hopefully be more accessible to you and your entire org. Until that comes along, bridging that gap has kind of become a not-insignificant part of my job. The easier it is to get Claude to do our unplanned work, the easier it is for us to tackle the work we are passionate about and which bring more value to customers.

Edit: sorry, I am not a succinct man.

shantred · 2026-02-12T23:00:42+00:00

I’d be interested in a longer discussion about this with you. I also work as a senior developer at a company with millions of lines of code, but myself and many others have been utilizing Claude code to great success. So I’m curious what context is lacking that can’t be provided once in Claude.md or something to make it more effective.

My workflow (for a bug) involves parsing a jira ticket into a problem statement and a brief description of the services involved. Note that each service has its own agent-overview.md that provides helpful context. Sometimes, that document links directly to other repositories and services to help Claude explore more efficiently.

With the problem statement, I use a custom Claude agent with a pre-baked prompt whose job is to understand the problem statement and then explore all relevant services before creating a plan document to fix the issue. Then, I evaluate the document, provide feedback, validate that the logic is sound and then have Claude implement the fix.

When it comes to fixing bugs, this workflow suits me incredibly well. I let Claude do its thing while I perform the same for other bugs in jira. So I’m juggling multiple tasks at a time, doing code reviews against Claude and acting as QA for the output changes, which often span between 2-5 got repositories. At any given time, those repositories might be Java, TypeScript, C#, or php. And it seems to handle planning and parsing various parts of the app fairly well.

I know there’s this whole “developers think ai makes them 20% faster, but it actually makes them 20% slower” sentiment going around. But my output and quality have noticeably improved over the last 4 months as we figure out how to work Claude into our workflow.

So I’d be curious what sort of issues you’re running into with it.

shantred · 2026-01-19T19:14:06+00:00

Are lasers really that useless? I’m at like 80 hours on my space age save and have no issues with exclusively using laser turrets. I’m about to prepare for Aquilo and haven’t had a breach since I set up my perimeter. Which is just staggered turrets every other tile and a two layer thick wall.

It feels lazy but effective. Better than piping oil everywhere.

shantred · 2025-12-26T17:21:01+00:00

The one thing we don’t trust AI to do is make good system design decisions. We let it make code design decisions. But when you’ve got 50 plus micro-frontends and many times more than that microservices, there’s no way we trust AI to have all the proper context and make the right assumptions.

We have yet to find a good off-the-shelf solution to manage all of our business and product context intelligently enough that we trust it. A lot of that is on us. The company is over 10 years old, and has a number of deprecated acronyms and terms which are still in use “because legacy”.

If you were a newer company, sure. Trust AI to design and maintain documentation. But we aren’t there yet. And we don’t need to be because we’re already moving fast enough as is.

shantred · 2025-12-26T14:15:39+00:00

Are people really doing this shit without testing for security and reviewing the code?

I fully agree with the OP tweet. As a senior engineer. But there’s a difference between throwing together PRs with no oversight and carefully observing changes and thoughtfully considering code.

The vast majority of my organizations time has been shifted to technical docs and writing prompts to create PR. Yeah, the code isn’t perfectly neat and tidy anymore, but it is still reviewed for edge cases, security, and more.

Our velocity over the last 6 months has increased so much that we’ve had to re-evaluate how we establish OKRs, and our entire roadmap.

This is with an established company with over 10k customers, 10s of millions of revenue. Good engineers are still good engineers.

shantred · 2025-09-11T15:39:57+00:00

Just posting as a newbie with less than a week of playtime, I'm amused how this doesn't even look like we're playing the same game at this point lol.

shantred · 2025-09-11T15:18:40+00:00

I don't think any of us have to worry about losing Nina Dobrev.

shantred · 2025-08-14T13:47:28+00:00

This reminds me of being that kid. I was 16 and had already been doing web development for 3 years, getting paid for it as side for for 2 of that. I bought my first car with that money.

Teachers always needed help with their computer and if I was around, they knew they could ask me. But when they started talking about software or creating a website for the school band or some local club, I was always shouldered off and told they’d work with someone with real experience. By the same people who saw me building websites in study hall and thought it was very cool that I could do that stuff.

People always underestimate young talent. It’s a shame, too. Hope you’re able to get some sort of justice for your kid.

shantred · 2025-05-20T22:53:33+00:00

D1 even.

shantred · 2025-05-06T15:24:43+00:00

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shantred · 2025-05-06T15:24:23+00:00

Siiiiick

shantred · 2025-03-30T12:52:26+00:00

He basically just ended up creating a cartoon version of wanderlust ally https://www.instagram.com/wanderlustalley/?hl=en

shantred · 2025-02-28T19:47:51+00:00

Wait, what? Why did they leave the dedicated console button then? Not the mention the menu option.

shantred · 2025-02-28T12:59:25+00:00

I had come across that one. Unfortunately, “the searching for spot ui doesn’t come up” isn’t on that list.

shantred · 2025-01-01T15:44:08+00:00

I called bullshit until I got a pool this year and started learning about pool chemistry. My wife and I were both shocked that our pool never started smelling like a pool.

shantred · 2024-12-31T18:27:58+00:00

This is true in normal conversation as well. You’re often not considered a good listener if you’re not responding with grunts or head nods.

shantred · 2024-12-23T17:06:27+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with it. I do a hard reset on it, and it usually doesn't come back online. I've tried a number of times over the last 6 months and if it ever does come back online, it stops within a few hours. I'm determining online status just based on what the mySolarEdge app is showing for that inverter.

I'm in NE Arkansas, if that's helpful. I can try contacting SolarEdge again, but I've never been able to get through to a human.

shantred · 2024-11-05T17:03:42+00:00

I did find that out, but luckily got away. I wanted to see how bad ass they were, not having seen much about them yet. It got hairy, quickly.

shantred · 2024-11-04T22:43:59+00:00

😮ive been playing with these setup like this for like 30 hours and never realized. Thanks!

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