Most experienced programmers have no experience deploying apps (or their experience is from earlier in their career). Especially engineers at big companies where there are whole teams dedicated to infra/devops.

The percentage of programmers with side projects they deploy themselves is very small. I’d guess less than 10% have a side project deployed somewhere. (And these days

Yeah. I'd say about 1/4 of my time on my new app has been spent on deployment-related stuff, rather than the app itself. And I'm not inexperienced with servers and cloud. It's a pretty big deal to integrate that stuff.

I'm an experienced programmer and deploying is a clusterfuck these days. It's by far the worst part of making software

I've really shortened the loop on deploying my side projects with Claude Code. I run it with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` on a prompt I've written and it adapts it for the project in hand with a "safe" set of defaults, and I've got a basic verification script to ensure it's not unsafe (e.g. can't access postgres from the web, firewall blocking all non-required ports). The rest - which can vary from project to project, like creating VMs, configuring rules, whether it's a rust project or a docker compose file - Claude knows how to handle pretty well. Super super simple now.

I should be clear here that "moving off the platform" involved a re-write for various reasons. First and foremost was that the LLM generated code was in a bad state due to the fact that he started in late 2024 when coding agents weren't really quite there yet and he had accumulated a LOT of tech debt very quickly. But Replit allowed him to validate the business viability first with some absolutely trash tier code (hacked 3x; one time where the hacker event sent an email to all customers).