Coders who don’t write code have never been as productive as they are now.
Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström said this week that some of the company’s most senior developers haven’t written any code in weeks — and that a positive development.
“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 actually only generate code and supervise it.”
Söderström shared the revelation during Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, telling investors that advancing AI is a matter of when, not if.
Söderström said the transition won’t be easy but that Spotify is all in on it.
“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 change.”
He added, “The tricky thing is that we’re in the middle of the change, so you also have to be very agile. The things you build now may be useless in a month.”
AI is reshaping the global workforce, and while few industries have escaped its impact in recent years, not everyone agrees on what the repercussions ultimately will be.
The classic debate is between those who believe AI will supplant humans in the workplace, leading to rampant unemployment, and those who believe those concerns are overblown and that the tech is merely an opportunity to do more work in less time.
Another view, however, has recently emerged, at least among the software engineers who are on the front line of these shifts: The drive to adopt AI in the workplace is causing “AI fatigue.”
AI fatigue isn’t a dislike of AI. It’s the new reality where engineers don’t have to write code, but instead review and fix it at a rate that some feel is unsustainable.
In a viral essay published this week, Siddhant Khare, a software engineer, said AI is only making his job harder.
“Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending, you just keep stamping those PRs,” he wrote, referring to pull requests, which are threads for developers to discuss changes before making them.
During Spotify’s earnings call, Söderström, like many CEOs, however, was mostly just focused on the efficiency of it all.
“That’s the opportunity we see in front of us,” he said. “Companies such as us are simply going to produce massively more software, up until our limiting factor is actually the amount of change that consumers are comfortable with.”
