Spotify says its best developers haven't written code since Dec, thanks to AI (opens in new tab)

They haven't written code in years seeing how their piece of shit desktop app uses more ram and cpu cycles to stream 192kbps music in a day than the entire NASA stack for all Apollo missions combined. They should ask Claude to rewrite it in a real programming language

I can picture the entire hierarchy telling whoever's next up the chain what they're demanding to hear.

I'd be scripting the consumption of lots of credits and sending the output to /dev/null to get a glowing performance review.

Man, a friend of mine hasn't written code for years. He generally comes in at least fifteen minutes late, using the side door - that way the boss can't see him, - and, uh, after that he just sorta spaces out for about an hour. He just stares at his desk; but it looks like he's working. He does that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week he probably only does about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work, and even that's just filling out TPS reports.

Doesn't say anything about what their worst developers have been doing...

Explains why the app hasn’t noticeably improved yet.

And it shows. Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.

And recently like 1 of every 10 consecutive songs just doesn't play. When clicking on the song, it feels like the app tries to redirect original song link (the "app" is a website) to some other link and it doesn't find it. As an example, Madonna - Frozen (from 1998 Ray of Light album) just doesn't play, just tried.

I have been paying Spotify customer since 2008 or something, I have playlists that are so old that it doesn't show dates added. Last week I cancelled my subscription, and switched to YouTube Premium (no ads + YT Music). YT music is even more horrible especially with playlists. Maybe I just buy somewhere (Amazon MP3?) my the 10 most listened albums and call it my music listening for the future.

And just wait for when they force their developers (that are not writing any line of code), to go back onsite because "remote is bad"...

Spotify also keeps bewaking every update, so I do not trust their opinions

The co-CEO gives a terrible example. A developer is working while commuting? How clear is one's thinking skills during that time? How safe is that to deploy a production commit? Does Spotify test in prod?

Spotify please open a limited time test api for experimenters without 250k DAU. There are people that would love to build that dont yet have that user base.

Is that why the Linux version is still broken?

The best developers are probably wading through slop filled code reviews.

That explains a lot....

Cool, this is great. The sooner these apps start collapsing from ill-written and unchecked code the better.

P.s. Im not a SWE for a living but I can see through this crap.