There is zero chance this is true.
Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI
Submitted 2 weeks ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
bagsy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tleb@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Probably just lying to their boss. I have an AI obsessed boss and regularly lie about how much I use it because productivity is actually measured entirely by their perception of you and not by any real metric.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I’ve tried explaining this to me peers that just quietly bust their asses while noisy jerks (including me, but to a lesser extent than most) get perceived as high performers because they engage with their bosses and work on things that have high visibility.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I thought about lying on my last report but decided to not. At this point they’re going to have to fire me if they can’t accept the truth. I’m not lying to save my skin.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
And their bosses are just lying to their bosses, and it’s lying and yessing all up and down the line, and the rest of out here just have to live with whatever The Machine pukes out for us.
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If I was working foe spotify I would honestly lie just to do something better than ask an AI to do bullshit for me
XLE@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Truth no longer matters to these clowns. Who cares about it’s true? Who cares that Spotify is already good… And the one thing they can do to is make it worse?
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I wonder about this often: the product is finished; aside from curation, what else does it need?
grue@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m not so sure. I could believe their entire job has been consumed by failing AI slop in code review.
RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
It’s probably true.
Think of it with this alternate headline:
Spotify reclassifies what constitutes a good developer
And no doubt, they’re capturing what these “good developers” do to better train the clanker to make the “bad developers” redundant.
itsathursday@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I need to watch scary movie again. Haven’t seen that since … Probably some time in the 00s. It’s probably super problematic though.
itsathursday@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Eh… funny is funny
RhondaSandTits@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Seeing this screenshot has prompted me to watch it tonight as well.
“Smell this!”
"Ew, what’s that?
“MY ASS”
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said.
Cool, so your goal is to replace your senior engineers with AI slop, but it’s still generating bugs? Doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.
“And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”
Translation: Want to work as hard as a sole proprietor but not get paid like one? Great! You can work from your car while dealing with bullshit commuter traffic. Also, if you get into an accident, you can’t claim worker’s compensation or SDL, because you’re not technically on the job, yet! Thanks for being a team player!
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Is the idea that they’re somehow reviewing the code on their phone during their commute? Or are they just pushing to prod without even glancing at it? Why bother with the middle man. Just have the AI push it. What a stupid admission.
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
It’s a “concrete example” that’s almost certainly fantasy. I bet everyone stood up and clapped when the engineer got to the office, too.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
i assumed the commuting to be done via public transport, but yes, you should not give one minute outside of working hours to the soulless company. I don’t know what these engineers are thinking, digging their way in the future when they’ll be made redundant.
bcgm3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Right? This article is so full of shit, there’s hardly room left for anything else. It’s like they only collected soundbites from the employees who are furthest from any actual development role…
bless@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
That explains how Anna’s Archives got in
Tangent5280@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I was so excited to get my grubby hands on that music only to later learn it was hundreds of terabytes…
murmelade@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
You were expecting to be able to burn out all the music in the world on a couple DVDs?
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Its also not sorted in any way that’s usable.
KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Promotes ICE and uses AI. What a company of assholes.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Don’t forget that they fork over millions of dollars to Joe Rogan while they are doing it.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Well…
They are swedish
ServantOfRa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Used to be, anyway. They don’t act like they are.
silverneedle@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Spotify’s functions have not changed a bit since 2016. It is literally the same application, what has changed are the tiny things they’re doing for compatibility but that is not really worth mentioning. Intentionally leaving UX out.
Honestly what code is there to write for this glorified web browser? They’re probably also outsourcing most of their data collection and recommendation algorithms.
Buy physical media, rip CDs, share shit and that’s it
filcuk@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
You are wrong on many points IMO.
I’ve been using it for nearly a decade, it’s changed a lot.
I don’t know why you’d be leaving ux out.
What code is there to write? You must be trolling come on now.silverneedle@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I’ve been using it for nearly a decade, it’s changed a lot. Same. I just simply don’t agree. If you consider tiny features not a soul needs like yearly reviews of one’s listening habits and the roll out of podcasts as things worth mentioning, ok, they were not exactly doing anything radically new at that point anyway. I don’t know why you’d be leaving ux out. Because UX 90% adds nothing and chiefly serves to suggest innovation. You must be trolling come on now. I am. I want Spotify employees to read this and get steamingly mad. They are complicit in ruining music.
merdaverse@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Like a lot of these big, consolidated, years long projects, the real work is maintenance. The rest is just a bunch of people desperately trying to improve obscure KPIs by 1%
deathbird@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Find a musician you like. Buy their music on Bandcamp. Download as FLAC.
silverneedle@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I wouldn’t place too much trust in Bandcamp. It was acquired by Epic Games and then sold to Songtradr shortly after, it’s waiting to enshittify. It might also be better to buy off of labels and artists directly if you want to “support” an artists or a label. Used CDs and vinyls are great too.
HereIAm@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I find Bandcamp missing most of the artists I listen to. I’ve had a lot more success buying from Qobuz and beatport.
suddenlyme@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
We can tell
paequ2@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
LOL. Exactly. This reminds me of a slop code change my manager recently posted. It was a million lines, where really it just needed to be like 3 or 4 lines. I refuse to do a real review for slop PRs.
Later in standup he proudly proclaims, “You know, that PR was mostly Claude.” … … …
I know! It was bad! You should feel bad! The fact that he was proud of it showed he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. More lines of code means higher performance, right?? 😂
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Is that supposed to be impressive? Spotify is among the dumbest, shittiest apps. It’s literally just a music library player.
Spotify doesn’t exist because it’s some genius app. It exists because of legal control. They have no reason to make the app better. Indeed their shitty capitalist motives continue to enshittify the app.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Notifications don’t even work for most of my saved podcasts.
Kissaki@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
From The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address (via on Lemmy)
Executives aren’t ignorant. They have the data. They commission the surveys. They attend the conferences where CTOs present their concerns. They know that:
- 91% of CTOs cite technical debt as the biggest challenge
- 75% of projects are expected to fail
- 69% of developers lose significant time to inefficiencies
- Only 39% of projects meet success criteria
- The recommended 15–20% investment in technical debt management yields better long-term returns than crisis spending
Yet they choose:
- Not to allocate recommended budgets for technical debt management
- Not to make quality a strategic priority despite CTOs’ and developers’ concerns
- Not to mention these challenges in public communications to shareholders
- To celebrate AI productivity gains whilst developers report record inefficiency
- To focus on the next hype cycle (AI) rather than address fundamental problems
This isn’t a failure of knowledge. It looks to me like a failure of courage and integrity. A failure of the very concept of leadership.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Their best developers.
The worst ones are still there checking the vibe coded garbage.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Those aren’t developers anymore.
zbyte64@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
A manager. This tool is for what managers think software development is: managing the production of code. From that perspective this hype makes a lot of sense, just turn all your current developers into managers with AI and you now have grown the team by 10x. You can go back in time and find many jokes about how adding more developers doesn’t speed up delivery but slows it down. I don’t see how AI would suddenly make that less true, especially since the AI is not accountable for its results, you are.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Lmao, exactly. If you’re not writing the code you’re not the developer, the AI is the developer. Youre just another asshole who gets paid to do nothing.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Has Spotify had any new code written?
atfergs@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This sounds like such a fucking nightmare. I got into software because I like writing code. Their job is now the equivalent of a full time PR reviewer.
BaroqueW@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
PR reviewer but the dev was drunk, sometimes is a genius, sometimes is eating sand, doesn’t follow guidelines, likes to duplicate code, and forgets what was in the original task description after a while.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And even if you babysit it and carefully tell it all the mistakes, it will learn nothing and suggest the same stupid mistakes next tim. I did actually know a human just like AI and he kept his job for years before quitting to grift another company because management refused to believe he sucked. So I’m not optimistic about AI screwing up discouraging business leaders.
paequ2@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I don’t review that shit. Those PRs tend to be huge walls of text. If you didn’t take any effort into preparing something for me, then I’m not making any effort into reviewing it for you.
Let the slop flow! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
When it breaks, I’m also not jumping in to fix it.
SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
They wheren’t been coding anything even before AI
azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
How is that still a reason to brag about
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Fewer lines of code -> fewer programmers -> smaller salaries -> higher stock value
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Bullshit
Skymt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s quite possible they already fired their best developers
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
This is spotify. It’s just a music player. The overwhelming bulk of the code was probably written like 20 years ago by a 15 year old.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Look at the feature list bragged about. It’s really simple stuff. I can absolutely believe they vibe coded that stuff.
The “hardest” one was to feed listener history to an LLM and have it generate a playlist based on the titles. That’s such an absurdly trivial thing to do.
It’s not rocket science. It’s a trivial streaming music player.
Shanmugha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hm. A new way to tell something is shit without actually using these words
Nugscree@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s why it keeps telling me I’m offline while having an active WiFi and 5G connection of which both work and no other apps have any issues with the internet.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For me it started crashing when I open an instance on another device
Lanske@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Glad i moved away from Spotify a year ago. Happy to ve using Qobuz and bandcamp
return2ozma@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Even if you don’t subscribe to Qobizz their magazine helps me find new music all the time
gezero@lemmy.bowyerhub.uk 2 weeks ago
The same company who got their whole DB of songs leaked?
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How many lines of code have they had to fix thanks to AI?
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m pretty sure the only way this is true, is if they qualify their best developers as the developers who use AI the most and by absolutely no metric which would indicate this is actually good code.
coherent_domain@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
I haven’t worked in the industry before, but I have always assumed the “best developer” reviews code and architects the project, thus they write a minimal amount of code pre-AI anyway…
omarthemediocre@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Is fixing all those AI written lines of code not counted as writing line of code?
IratePirate@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Never used it.
Started self-hosting Navidrome.
Never gonna use it.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Yeah they’re gonna need to save all the money they can because everyone I know is cancelling their subs to basically every service, from Amazon to Spotify to Crunchyroll to Netflix.
These fucking companies think they can do whatever they want and we’ll just roll over and take it and continue to give them cash every month.
orioler25@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Good thing Anna’s Archive exists and just keeps getting better.
AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Explains a lot
motruck@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
They ate lying without a question.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Is this why my wife is constantly complaining that her playlists constantly keep playing the same songs over and over?
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fuck yeah, it is.
Corngood@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
My favourite example of Spotify being shit is:
I want to play an album, so I go to it and press play. Then a bit later I want to queue a second album after the first one is done. How do I do that? As far as I can tell the answer is to go fuck myself. I have start a new queue or playlist with both albums in it.
That’s apart from all the basic software quality stuff like randomly restarting the queue.
unnamed1@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Spotifys UX has always been terrible. We all got used to having crappy software. It’s too convenient that’s AI also makes crappy vibecode without supervision. No one will notice anything.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The point of these apps is to leech as much money as possible.
An opposing goal would be to make the app better for users.
LOLjoeWTF@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Have you fixed anything when it’s done something you’ve hated? I sometimes think, “I can fix this” and the I let my workarounds last for years. Like a leaky faucet where I fix it by rotating the handle not to 180° but to like 185.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
No, that’s just random being random. In order for something truly random to feel less random to the average person, you have to reduce the repetition.
kinsnik@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
and that is what spotify actually does: …atspotify.com/…/shuffle-making-random-feel-more-…
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
This is the difference between randomly choosing songs and randomly choosing songs without repetition.
Both are random but the later is much better for humans.
(It’s like in statistics problems choosing colored balls from a box with or without replacement.)
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Idk why the donwvotes. This is how these players implement randomness, because people don’t actually want a random shuffle most times.
Kissaki@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
function GetRandomNumber(): return 42;IratePirate@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
IllegalArgumentException: expected random number, got Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.