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Comment by faangguyindia | Hacker News Reader

Most of the problem is that talking to non technical people is frustrating, they often start like

1. Can u add X 2. Can u change Y

Without understanding cost of doing all this. Yes, i can do all and everything you ask for, but each action has a cost, which you fail to understand.

We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

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This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know what things cost before asking.

it's not possible to make everyone understand nuclear physics, there is certain threshold of cognitive skills/motivation required for that.

The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

In these situations, the non-technical people don’t understand the costs, the technical people don’t understand the benefits. The communication from both sides is needed to find a good cost-to-benefit tradeoff

So you estimate costs in months and dollars, and give that in response to each. Very solvable issue.

Then we ask "whys" to understand the non-technical process. Maybe there is no need to add/change anything.

> We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

Agreed, otherwise it would be Turing complete Excel/Email clone.

That cost has now gone way down, with AI doing that code thing. Love it or hate it, that is the reality.

i've all AI subscription, cost is definitely down but risks aren't. You can still break things, you can make mistakes.

Has it, though? There's still features that bring large user value and require 10 lines of code, and features that bring a small user value and require AI to burn tokens on huge refactors and babying to make sure it doesn't break anything.

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