1,500+ PRs Later: Spotify’s Journey with Our Background Coding Agent (Honk, Part 1)
Nov 1, 2025Max Charas (Senior Staff Engineer) and Marc Bruggmann (Principal Engineer)
Summary
This post details the evolution of Spotify's Fleet Management system by integrating AI coding agents, codenamed 'Honk,' to automate complex code transformations and large-scale software maintenance. It introduces a flexible CLI for agent delegation, evaluation, and logging, enabling seamless switching between LLMs and agents. Over 1,500 AI-generated PRs have been merged, demonstrating significant time savings (60-90%) for tasks like language modernization (Java records), breaking-change upgrades (Scio), and UI component migration (Backstage). The platform is being extended for ad-hoc tasks via Slack and GitHub Enterprise, and the team is addressing new challenges in performance, predictability, safety, and cost.
More from the AI-Assisted Developer Productivity Platform trail
- Why Spotify Is Not Using Bayesian A/B Testing | Spotify Engineering
- Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90% | Spotify Engineering
- AI Changed How Spotify Builds. What We Learned (and Fixed) About Quality at Higher Velocity
- When Can LLMs Replace Humans in A/B Tests? | Spotify Engineering
- Coding Is No Longer the Constraint: Scaling Developer Experience to Teams and Agents at Spotify | Spotify Engineering