Programmers who don’t write code are more productive than ever before.
Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström said this week that some of the company’s most senior developers haven’t written any code in weeks, and said it’s a positive development.
“When I talk to our most senior engineers, our best developers, they actually say they haven’t written a single line of code since December,” he said. “It’s really just generating code and monitoring it.”
Söderstrom shared this fact during Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, telling investors that advances in AI are not a matter of when.
Söderström said the transition will not be easy, but Spotify is fully committed.
“There’s going to have to be a lot of change for these technology companies if they want to stay competitive, and we’re committed to leading that change,” he said. “It’s going to be painful for a lot of companies because it’s going to change engineering practices, product practices, design practices.”
He added: “The challenge is that we are in the midst of change, so we have to be very agile. What we’re building now might not be useful in a month.”
AI is reshaping the global workforce; Few industries have been spared its impact in recent years, but not everyone agrees on what that impact will ultimately be.
The classic debate is between those who believe that AI will replace humans in the workplace and cause widespread unemployment, and those who believe that such concerns are overblown and that technology is simply an opportunity to get more done in less time.
But a different perspective has recently emerged, at least among the software engineers at the forefront of these changes. The movement to introduce AI in the workplace is causing “AI fatigue.”
AI fatigue doesn’t mean you don’t like AI. This is a new reality where engineers don’t have to write code, but instead review and fix code at a rate that some find unsustainable.
Software engineer Siddhant Khare said in a controversial essay published this week that AI is only making his job harder.
“Every time I feel like I’m a judge on an assembly line and that assembly line is never ending, I keep pushing PR,” he said of pull requests, a thread for developers to discuss before making changes.
But during Spotify’s earnings call, Söderstrom, like many CEOs, was all about efficiency.
“That’s the opportunity in front of us,” he said. “Companies like ours are simply going to produce a lot of software until the limiting factor is the amount of changes that consumers are actually happy with.”
