/Tech4h ago

Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto argues Spotify and Anthropic's AI velocity metrics are meaningless without actual product improvements

Story Overview

Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty and HashiCorp co-founder, is calling out AI velocity claims from Spotify and Anthropic as empty without visible gains in how products actually feel to users, urging a shift toward satisfaction reports instead of deploy counts or code volume.

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#1562

Original post

Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh#1562inTech

Amongst my friends, Spotify is the lowest quality consumer app we still pay for. It certainly hasnt gotten noticeably better in the last couple years (arguably worse). So, this is not the positive look Ant and Spotify are spinning here.

Bigger picture, this is the problem with a lot of AI reporting. It reports completely meaningless metrics like deploys per day or LoC. Why don’t we start reporting consumer satisfaction reports? Actually end state research results.

All the no nuance AI people always come out and think that this is anti AI. Again, I think AI is great and Claude is great. But this is bad marketing and makes both look like clowns.

7:58 AM · Jun 30, 2026 · 4.7K Views

Open Question

Satisfaction beats speed every time

Hashimoto notes Spotify has not improved noticeably for consumers despite the cited activity levels, leaving open whether the internal AI tools are delivering real end-user value or just internal throughput.

Developer Impact

The framing that makes teams look silly

By spotlighting raw metrics like daily production deploys without tying them to quality outcomes, companies risk appearing disconnected from what matters most to customers, though direct satisfaction benchmarks remain unreported here.

Sentiment

Many users agree with Mitchell Hashimoto that Spotify's high AI deploy counts are misleading because the app quality has declined and such metrics ignore actual user satisfaction.

Pos

15.7%

Neg

84.3%

34 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

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Posts from X

Most Activity

VIEWS5.4KLIKES169REPLIES6

Kent C. Dodds 🏹@kentcdodds

@mitchellh To be fair, Spotify has had a bad UX since before AI coding agents, so at least they're consistent.

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BOOKMARKS3

Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh

App store reviews are like yelp or google reviews. That's not how you get real consumer reports. I assisted consumer studies for two diff companies (just as a eng observer in the room or behind the one-way glass, studies were run by real statisticians). If they're producing videos of this quality, they can do real studies by a 3rd party that by contract has to publish all results so they can't filter.

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RETWEETS2

ben hylak@benhylak

i don't agree with everything here (i love spotify) but the larger point is spot on.

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Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh

@kentcdodds Yes absolutely. Can’t blame AI for the bad experience, but it also hasn’t gotten any better lol

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paul@Paul_provalone

@mitchellh 4,500 production deploys per day and the changelog looks like this

4h47233

Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh

@kentcdodds This sounds right anecdotally. Its an accelerator for sure, but it only changes the magnitude of the vector not its direction.

4h1.1K112

staysaasy@staysaasy

@mitchellh Spotify is the only large-scale consumer app I use that semi-regularly ships UX updates that meaningfully degrade a major workflow that I was relying on. If Youtube are the yankees they're like a weekend slow-pitch softball league.

4h503171

wizplum@wizplum

@mitchellh Sadly, every month subscriptions renew continues to prove that shipping slop and not caring about reliability is the right business strategy. They will not care until people vote with their feet, and so far that seems not to be happening.

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GrumpyBalkanSoftwareEngineer@TheBalkanHacker

@mitchellh I will ask the question every sw eng. on twitter is asking right now... where are these features from thousands of daily merges 🤣 ... I use the app almost everyday ... where are the features ...

4h1.2K17

Kent C. Dodds 🏹@kentcdodds

@mitchellh It's almost like AI is more of an amplifier of existing product sense than an augmenter of it 😐

4h1.1K16

Saurabh Garg@saurabhg

@mitchellh The app is 4.7 rated on the AppStore. It seems like customers are satisfied?

4h3.6K6

James@haymez

@mitchellh I don't understand how people in this industry don't get this.. We're all clapping that LLMs are shoving a bunch of changes into a product in record time. Are the changes good? No one seems to actually care. It's bizarre.

4h5974

Dusan@dduxAdventure

@mitchellh I don’t get why people think you’re anti AI when your takes are extremely based

4h8032

Joe Wilson@joewilsonai

It's funny listening to everyone talk here about not understanding what they ship if you realize how big their user base is. You guys are just focusing on the front end. The distributed backend to handle that amount of volume is complex, and they've only been doing this since, what did he say, Opus 4.5, maybe 4 or 4.6. So give it some time while they clean up the backend.

What's really interesting, and it tells me a lot of people in here have never worked with an service that has millions of users. The interface is just a tiny bit of their codebase. Give it time. For companies like this, I guarantee you they'll end up with a better product in the long term.

3h2113

Marat_Galiev@Marat_Galiev

@mitchellh Why can't you just mind your own business bro?

4h1343

Conservative Armenians@ConserArmenians

@mitchellh Spotify has great design, terrible functionality and quality. Apple Music has great functionality and quality but terrible design. Tidal had both but no features

4h2375

Swarup Karavadi@swazza85

Doing 1000s of deploys a day is not something new to the industry. Here is a 2016 paper on how this volume is (was?) normal at high profile companies - https://research.facebook.com/publications/continuous-deployment-at-facebook-and-oanda/

I don’t understand why Spotify is catching heat on this discourse. Yeah, blind use of AI and meaningless metrics suck, but I don’t see how they are causal to perception of lowered quality on their app.

4h283

Gustavo Gonzalez@gusgonzalezs

@mitchellh I still don’t understand why you need hundreds of teams and microservices for running something like Spotify

4h2624

Kyle Johnson@kyledotai

@saurabhg @mitchellh You can game them if you’re good. Time the review request with a magic moment.

4h421

Alexis@MooMooMeuh

@mitchellh Every single feature that’s been added to Spotify these past few years have been nothing but noise: « smart » shuffle which lags when pressing it ( with no way to disable it), lots of information that is just useless (videos, news..) I mean wtf I just want to listen to music?

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