by 
T
his week on The Brief, Meta’s trying to fly under the radar with a facial recognition tech rollout, ByteDance causes a freak-out in Hollywood, and Spotify’s engineers are now vibe-coding everything thanks to Claude Code.
After researching our third story on Spotify, I wanted to ‘walk the walk’ and give these new features a whirl. I opened up Claude Code and gave some prompts for a new website. Visually striking but barely passable outcomes emerged.
With the heaviest dose of skepticism, I closed out my Claude Code window and went to pressure test the new “Prompted Playlist” on Spotify. I put in a prompt that mixed my favorite genres, told it to access my 10+ year Spotify history, and asked it to create a playlist that I’d both love… and feel my taste stretched toward artists I might not know.
After a few minutes, it not only delivered one of the best playlists I’ve ever listened to, it provided ‘notes’ for each song and why it picked it, which I found fascinating (especially on why I’d like the new artists).
The playlist is incredible. My vibe-coded websites are absolutely not. This is not by accident. The reason my Claude Code projects are both thinly beautiful and laughable, and Spotify’s Prompted Playlist feature is groundbreaking, is the human behind the AI curtain.
When you’re making something with AI, you’re relying on what already exists. In the case of Spotify, that’s a thoroughly developed product with an enormous amount of historical data. Senior Spotify engineers are technically brilliant, and their ideas, amplified by AI writing the code for them, can make brilliant net-new features. While Claude Code may be technically powering that, on its own, it can’t derive the insight that leads to the creation of anything to write home about. It will continue to be reliant on what’s already in place, which in the case of my website experiments, is a whole lot of not much.
So… rest easy. Humans are still very much in the loop.