Spotify opens Xirp to everyone, the workbench for coding agents

Spotify has opened Xirp to the public, a program its engineers had been using internally to coordinate several coding agents at once. It is neither a model nor an agent: it is the layer that sits above existing agents and puts them in order.

The problem it addresses comes from how widely code-writing assistants have spread inside companies. When thousands of developers use them daily, context fragments across sessions that do not talk to each other, the same work gets redone several times, computing capacity is wasted and nobody has an overall view of what the agents are doing. Xirp responds by holding the sessions together: each runs in its own worktree, a separate copy of the repository, so that dozens of agents can work on the same code without getting in each other's way.

Neutrality towards suppliers

The feature Spotify highlights is vendor neutrality. Xirp runs Anthropic's Claude Code, Google's Gemini command line and OpenAI's Codex side by side, along with open models hosted internally. A session's working state can be transferred from one tool to another mid-project, which according to the company removes the migration cost that normally deters switching supplier. It is a weighty argument in a market where every lab pushes its own agent and the choice tends to become irreversible.

The second element is the link to Portal, the service catalogue Spotify uses to keep track of its own software architecture, derived from Backstage, the tool the company had already released as an open project. Agent sessions start with organisational context already loaded: who owns a service, what it depends on, which technical decisions were taken in the past. At the end, transcripts and metadata flow back into Portal and remain available to the rest of the team.

The internal usage figures reported by the company mention more than thirty-six thousand sessions and thousands of engineers who adopted the tool without it being imposed from above. Xirp is a macOS application, requires an account and is currently offered as a free beta. That a music streaming company should end up distributing development tools is less unusual than it sounds: it already happened with Backstage, now in use far beyond Spotify.