What the Dev? 331: How Spotify created its own AI tool, AiKA, to improve developer productivity (with Spotify's Pia Nilsson)
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Oct 21, 2025 
Jenna interviews Pia Nilsson, a Senior Director at Spotify specializing in enhancing developer productivity, who led the creation of Aika, Spotify's internal AI tool. They delve into why Spotify chose to build Aika rather than using existing solutions, exploring its daily applications for developers in onboarding and troubleshooting. Pia shares insights on Aika's integration with tools like Backstage and GitHub, and discusses the challenges faced during its development. Exciting future possibilities for Aika are also teased, including enhancements to Spotify's Portal.
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Hack Week Birth Of AiKA
- Pia Nilsson described building AiKA as a Hack Week project in 2023 that consolidated many experimental chatbots into one tool.
- The team shipped AiKA to production at Spotify in December 2023 after finishing the consolidation work.
Unified Access Cuts Context Switching
- AiKA connects to many internal data sources like tech docs, Slack, Backstage Portal, Confluence, Google Drive, GitHub, and Jira.
- This unified access reduces developer context switching for onboarding, debugging, and troubleshooting.
Design For Extensibility And IDE Integration
- Build AI tools with extensibility so teams can add their own data sources and IDE integrations.
- Integrate agentic experiences into popular IDEs to meet developers where they work.