Test AI coding tools before dismissing them

Our best developers have not written a single line of code since December

That was the line that caught my attention from last week's Spotify earnings call. It's something we're hearing more and more at the moment. This particular sentence was spoken by the company's Co-CEO/CTO Gustav Söderström.

Gustav went on to give this practical 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... they receive a working build, and can merge it to production before even reaching the office.

There are lots of opinions, especially in and around financial services, about the efficacy of this kind of approach. It is totally valid to refute or explain why this kind of setup "just won't work" in X or Y situations.

What's important, though, is to test.

Yes, it might not be appropriate in your core banking setup. Or, yes, it might not integrate nicely with your monolithic 1990s configuration.

But...

Have you tried it? Have you tested it? Recently? Have you encouraged your teams to (safely, of course) evaluate these tools and see how they work in real-world scenarios?

That's my ask. You don't have to 'do a Spotify', but I think it's important that you encourage (or require?) your teams to look up from their work regularly and take a bit of time to evaluate how emerging technologies might be used to drive efficiencies.

At the moment, you're doing it right if you're testing and learning.

I can definitely see a time when deploying and implementing these kinds of tools will not be optional.

"Thanks for helping sign-post the way, Gustav at Team Spotify!