How do you handle a client asking for something you thi...

Not by refusing outright, and not by quietly building what I think is right instead either. I get back to the outcome first — what has to be true at the end for this to have actually been worth doing — which usually surfaces the real constraint that produced their request in the first place, one they may not have stated explicitly.

Then I present the trade-off in the client’s own terms, with concrete cost and risk attached rather than an abstract architectural preference. If they still want their original version after that, I build the thin version of it first, so any disagreement gets settled by real evidence rather than by whoever argues more persuasively in a meeting.

Being right about architecture and losing the client’s trust in the process is a losing trade — the goal is a system that ships and that they still want to work with me on afterwards, not a technically correct argument I won and a relationship I didn’t.