Comment by cuuupid
4 days ago
This is just the latest in a series of vibe-coding caused bugs, Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve...
I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.
My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
The Spotify hate is so forced. Everyone's complaints boil down to "the UX doesn't work exactly like I want". I find these changes mildly annoying like anyone else, but Spotify is miles ahead of everyone else in terms of discovery and it's not even close. It's not perfect but no service is.
Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?
Sounds like they have the same problem all software companies have as soon as the MBAs took over.
Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.
The MBAs work in the interests of the C-suite. It's their stat-padding that's made Daniel Ek a billionnaire despite running losses for 99% of the time he's led the company.
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The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.
For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.
With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.
Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."
I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.
[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify#comment-1048914
Don't you just swipe right on a song to add it to the queue?
I wish! Just tried this on the iPhone app (sure it's all the same flavor of electron) but it doesn't work.
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Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.
I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players), anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune until the desktop software was unable to connect to it, loved that device.
Really tempted to buy this device:
https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku
Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really aware of the waifu but she has good taste.
Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the audio quality of locally hosted music.
But Spotify is so much simpler.. And recommendations are great
Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.
I click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue.
Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?
Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?
I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
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I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.
Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.
The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.
I agree too, additionally to that, the whole API ecosystem is good enough to build alternative clients.
I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level) I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.
Try using apple music
I bought another app to play Apple Music because that’s how much the Music app usability has decreased.
It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.
So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)
spotify has no performance review process or any sort of performance management. Never heard of anyone getting piped there for many years i was there.
> Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:
It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.
Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.
Heavily disagree. Good UI, lot of innovation, no bugs for me. Very pleasant to use. And totally free.
What has Spotify done towards innovation for the end users? They definitely innovated by rat fucking musicians to earn more money, but that seems like a trait that hurts society and not uplifts it.
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