Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) stopped publishing video podcast episodes on Spotify after experiencing three publishing outages in five weeks, a delayed and inaccurate incident report, and no meaningful reliability improvements. He draws a parallel between Spotify's aggressive AI adoption — 73% of PRs AI-assisted, engineers running 5-10 parallel Claude sessions — and a degradation in platform reliability, coining the term 'AI psychosis' for companies that sacrifice operational stability in pursuit of AI adoption. He argues that consistently 'sucking less' is what retains users, and that Spotify is failing that test.
Table of contents
Unable to publish Spotify podcast episodes 3 out of 5 weeksNo incident review three weeks later, so I quit SpotifyIncident review finally published, but with a wrong timelineDoes Spotify have “AI psychosis?”Value of staying reliable & “sucking less”114 Impressions