Is this advice to help them maximize their business, or a personal whine that you want it but don’t want to pay so much?

Only the customers can tell this person if $60 is too much. If yure upset because it’s more than you would pay - say that. Otherwise you’re really just asking for a Porsche at the price of a Honda.

Is this what you should have said, without couching in a way that makes it sound “official”? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349932

There are design patterns / architectures that data engineers often employ to make this less "sucky". Data modeling is magical! (Specifically talking about things like datelist and cumulative tables)

> pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation

Can you help me think through how this looks when considering car manufacturing? Originally hand made cars were things of craftsmanship, but significantly lower quality and reliability than those produced with tiny tolerances on insane production lines. I'd take a modern car over a handmade one just about any day of the week.

In terms of risk, building a prototype and getting a quick win really de-risks a project. Smart decision makers' world is a game of risk - they have tolerance in some areas, less tolerance in others. If you can materialize a quick win from a prototype, it's significantly less risky that sight-unseen work.

Coders often don't think in terms of a broad investment portfolio, but that's how I've seen good executives phrase things. AI makes it cheaper and easier to build that prototype - I've been loving it for my own projects, because of how quickly I can deliver that first software.

I use Cursor and vibe code this stuff, it works great! I just built a flight tracker (I live in a flight path) that uses a SDR to receive ADS-B info from overhead flights and enrich it with flight info from the local airport, then display in a train station style flippy board. My wife loves knowing where the flights are going and so I display on our magic mirror

I know almost nothing about the underlying technologies, can barely code JS for the front end. But after about 10 hours of coding, I’ve got a very neat little app - it’s something that would have taken me 2 months then become abandonware after I got frustrated.

This was such a positive experience with vibe coding that it restored my love for code. Resulting quality seems pretty decent - maybe 1200 sLOC with good logging, performance, and what I would say is decent pro-am code quality. (IE above the median quality for typical commercial code, I’d bet)