Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström revealed during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that some of its most senior developers have not written a single line of code since December, as they now rely entirely on AI to generate code and focus instead on reviewing and supervising the output. Söderström highlighted this shift as a sign of progress, not a decline in capability. “When I speak to my most senior engineers—the best developers we have—they actually say that they haven’t written a single line of code since December,” he said. “They’re now generating code and supervising it, which is a new kind of productivity.” The comment underscores Spotify’s aggressive push to integrate AI across its engineering workflows. Söderström emphasized that the transition is inevitable and necessary for staying competitive. “There is going to have to be a lot of change in these tech companies if you want to stay competitive, and we are absolutely hell-bent on leading that change,” he said. “It will be painful for many companies, because engineering practices, product practices, and design practices will all evolve.” He acknowledged the challenges, noting that the pace of change is so rapid that projects built today may become obsolete in just a few weeks. “We’re in the middle of the change,” he said. “You have to be very agile.” While some executives view AI as a tool to dramatically increase output, engineers on the front lines are raising concerns about the toll of constant oversight. A growing number are reporting what’s being called “AI fatigue”—not a rejection of AI, but a sense of burnout from the relentless cycle of reviewing, refining, and approving AI-generated code. In a widely shared essay, software engineer Siddhant Khare described the experience as being “a judge at an assembly line that never stops.” He wrote about the exhausting rhythm of reviewing endless pull requests—automatically generated by AI—without the creative or technical engagement of writing code from scratch. Despite these concerns, Spotify’s leadership remains focused on the potential for exponential growth in software development. “That’s the opportunity we see in front of us,” Söderström said. “Companies like ours are going to produce massively more software—until our limiting factor becomes not engineering capacity, but how much change consumers are willing to accept.” As AI reshapes the tech industry, the debate continues: Will it empower developers to do more, or simply demand more of them without meaningful relief? At Spotify, the answer appears to be both—driving unprecedented output, but at a human cost that’s only beginning to be measured.