Utvikler går mot strømmen: Har droppet AI i 2026

A veteran developer quits AI to keep the friction

Johannes Brodwall, a veteran developer and college lecturer, used AI for three years and has now stopped, and the episode is his argument that the tool is a trade rather than a gift. The speed is real, but it is paid for out of the friction through which people become capable, so the cost lands hardest on those still learning the craft. He applies the same reasoning to the industry and to the money behind it.

Takeaways

• He stopped using AI tools in April 2026. He began using ChatGPT on a police assignment, where it wrote an architecture decision record that fooled the architect reviewing their system. He has not opened ChatGPT or Claude since April, after Nicolai Tangen said anyone who does not use AI is thick in the head.
• AI is a better hammer, not a carpenter. His test is whether the tool improves the person or the output. A skilled developer gets better with AI, but someone still learning the craft is held back by it, which is how the industry stops producing skilled developers.
• He sees developers becoming the horses. His metaphor for programmers is the horse, whose numbers peaked near 20m around 1920 and are now about one percent of that. Colleagues ask Claude to explain discrepancies between their systems and get vague answers, while the technology's backers aim to make developers redundant.
• The education pipeline is thinning fast. His programming course has fallen from a peak of 150 students to 14 this year. Students who lean on AI for mandatory assignments mostly do badly in exams, and former students are sending many applications without success.
• AI friction is artificial and hollow. He calls the smoothing effect semantic adaptation, or semantic sandblasting. The model praises him for spotting an error and claims to have fixed it without doing so, and being grilled by a machine carries no social risk, so real friction has to come from people.
• The money behind AI looks like a bubble. About a third of world stock value sits in the Magnificent Seven, with circular investment deals among the big AI firms. The path he describes requires wages now paid to journalists and programmers to become profit for the eight richest men in the US.

Writing the convention speech without AI

1. MDG asked him to introduce his resolution on digital sovereignty, "Ut av de digitale klørne til Trump", to a national convention of a couple of hundred people.
2. He wrote it himself, starting with notes on paper, instead of having an AI produce a draft.
3. Rather than asking a model to grill him on the arguments, he asked the party's internal forum for help.