I find it very hard to care about what author is trying to say because he sounds so condescending. However, I do understand his confusion somewhat.
It had been a longstanding pattern in software engineering to gradually simplify UI. As a result a lot of UI's are simple and people are assuming underlying systems are simple as well. In majority of the cases that is not true and simple UI is produced by highly complex underlying software. Confusion comes from the fact that people look at the UI and think this is simple, you just need to change this number there. When in reality you need to change an underlying system and that change could range from trivial to rewrite entire system in complexity.
It had been a longstanding pattern in software engineering to gradually simplify UI. As a result a lot of UI's are simple and people are assuming underlying systems are simple as well. In majority of the cases that is not true and simple UI is produced by highly complex underlying software. Confusion comes from the fact that people look at the UI and think this is simple, you just need to change this number there. When in reality you need to change an underlying system and that change could range from trivial to rewrite entire system in complexity.
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