One college radio DJ described riyl.fm to me as:

“Like if Spotify didn’t use AI for Wrapped. Like a real person actually cared.”

That realllllly stuck with me because parts of riyl.fm were, in fact, built with AI. And lots of real people at Spotify really care about Wrapped (I used to be one of them!)

To be clear: the curation, creative, editorial, and design thinking behind RIYL were intentionally human-led and all data was carefully calculated independently from LLMs.

But I used Claude Code as a development tool to build the website, prototype ideas and visualize the data.

The irony isn’t lost on me that while building a project about human music discovery and community, the creation process itself felt more solitary and AI-driven than any product I worked on during my years at Spotify.

The first years of building Wrapped at Spotify were scrappy and deeply collaborative. And like most of Spotify's best products, employee-driven.

In 2016, two people from the marketing team literally cornered me in an elevator and grilled me to see if my team had any extra engineering capacity to help build a year-end campaign. We pulled together an email experience for the ~10k artists (IIRC) using Spotify for Artists at the time in just a few weeks.

By the final year I worked on Wrapped in 2019, we launched to more than 1 million artists with hundreds of people contributing across product, engineering, design, data science, editorial, and marketing as a top priority for the company. Teams started working on Wrapped many months in advance.

was built in one month by three people, part-time.

And while I’m proud of what we pulled together, I’d 100% rather be in a room full of people debating which data stories make the cut and collectively shaping a product together than me dictating to Claude Code at 3am.

Is it cool to get a feature request from a DJ and implement it in the same day without writing a Jira ticket? Yeah. Does that actually lead to a better product, or a more bloated one? You tell me. But, I am certain it feels a lot worse to create mostly alone, with AI, at least to me.

Data scientists, product designers, mobile developers who want to shake up music discovery, I want to work with you! hello@riyl.fm