Earlier today, I opened Gojek and noticed something was off about the UI. I took a screenshot, zoomed in, and realized I was right. The shadow of the Gopay balance bar is clipped.
A screenshot of the Gojek app home page with Casey Muratori on a recent podcast with NeetCode
When I saw that, it took me back to the year 2018 when I was 15 years old developing an app for a local cafe. I remembered how frustrated I was trying to fix this. I ended up with a fix that I wasn't even satisfied with, and I felt there had to be a better solution or maybe I was doing it wrong. It happens when a component with a shadow doesn’t have enough space for the shadow to render, so it gets clipped. I ended up adding extra spacing below it and reducing the spacing of the component underneath so the layout still looked the same. Now I understand that the frustration was just an obstacle that I needed to learn my way through.
Nowadays, AI agents can fix many of these problems for us. We only need to point out that something looks wrong and it will, most of the time, find and fix the problem. AI agents may be one of the most transformative innovations in computing history, but they also risk removing the kind of friction that learning depends on. Students, teachers, everyone is delegating their work to these AI agents to be more efficient, slowly trading struggle for convenience, and I can’t help but wonder what happens when nobody struggles through problems anymore.
The Wall-E Effect
From the film Wall-E. Image courtesy of Pixar Studios
Recently, I rewatched WALL-E with my little sister for the first time since I was a kid. It’s a movie about Earth becoming a planet buried in garbage due to extreme mass consumerism, forcing humanity to leave on what was supposed to be a five-year space cruise while robots cleaned the planet. But as the years passed, Earth’s atmosphere became even more toxic from the overwhelming amount of waste, and the cruise quietly continued for hundreds of years. Eventually, humanity disappeared from Earth entirely.
The cruise passengers were happy, to say the least. Robots took care of everything for them. They floated around on flying chairs, never needing to work, while every part of their lives was controlled digitally. It sounds comfortable, even desirable, but at what cost? Humanity had become lazy. People grew obese, babies never learned to walk, and everyone spent their days staring at screens while video calling friends sitting right beside them. They had become completely dependent on machines, and the most terrifying part was that they never realized what they had become because they never had to.
Looking Back
The frustration I had about the shadow clipping was a blessing. I learned my way through even though it wasn't perfect but that's okay. Now I wonder what a decade or two from now will look like. I wonder what my little sister will become then. But then I remembered an article written by the amazing father of two sets of twins Aaron Francis, An argument for logging off.
It's okay not to worry about what is happening to the world. There is only so much we can do about it. We have to focus more on what we can do and less on what the world will become. Have some hope. Instead of letting our children use AI to speedrun their homework, be there and work the problem with them.
Don't be the cruise passenger. Also fix that damn shadow clipping Gojek.