I think experienced programmers underestimate how tricky it is to sort the deploying to cloud platforms bit for beginners.
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
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.
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.