As a literal example, I've occasionally been asked to put some process that was previously done physically "on the computer". That is, perhaps a paper log of some important activity that they'd now like to have a program for, or a physical token system for tracking a critical resource.

Often computerizing is useful, but sometimes it turns out that any conceivable software version would actually be significantly worse than what they're already doing.

In a case like that, you truly can solve their problem by not writing any code.

(Obviously, this only works if they ultimately agree.)