Last week I built a little dashboard with Claude. Took maybe ten minutes. Then I spent the next hour trying to get it online.
ssh in, install docker, write a Dockerfile, set up nginx, run certbot, certbot fails, read the log, oh the DNS hasn't propagated, wait, run it again, open port 443, realize ufw was blocking it the whole time. By the time it was live I'd forgotten what the app even did.
I've done that maybe a few hundred times by now. I'm a backend guy, I'm fast at it. But fast at something boring still means doing the boring thing.
So at some point I just thought: the AI already wrote the app. Why does it stop right when the annoying part starts? Why doesn't it just deploy the thing itself?
The reason is it has no hands. The model can write you a perfect docker-compose file. It can't ssh into your box and run it. No connection to your server, nowhere to hold your key.
