Welcome to Dev Mode, where we show you how Spotify builds, with live demos on our own repos and PRs. No slides. Just the workflows we actually use on real Spotify problems, plus an honest conversation about what’s working and what still trips us up.
In this episode, Dave Zolotusky is joined by Jonatan Dahl (JD), Staff Engineer, and Stuart Clark, Sr. Developer Advocate, to tackle a problem you’ve probably run into: you hand an AI agent a big task, and somewhere along the way it runs out of context, starts going in circles, and forgets what it was doing. So what if you stopped asking one agent to do everything?
JD shows us how he splits one big piece of work across a bunch of agent sessions in Xirp, our mission control for AI coding agents, and keeps tabs on every one of them as it moves from in progress to merged. Then we get into the part that really makes or breaks it: context.
What does each agent actually need to know, what should you leave out, and what happens when you get it wrong? (Spoiler: things go off the rails pretty fast.)
Along the way, Dave, Stuart, and JD tackle the questions we all have:
When is one session enough?
When does splitting work into smaller PRs make life easier for the people reviewing it?
Which habits have actually stuck around at Spotify, versus the ones we quietly dropped?
If you’ve ever watched an agent lose the plot halfway through a task, this one’s for you.
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