There’s a cost that shows up right after AI writes the code. Not the debugging cost. Not the “works on my machine” cost. The one that comes even earlier, before any of that. The deploy cost. Here’s what I mean You prompt Claude or ChatGPT to build a landing page. It does it in 45 seconds. Clean HTML, good structure, looks exactly right in the chat window. Then what? For developers, this is trivial. Push to GitHub, Netlify picks it up, done. But most people using AI to build web pages right now are not developers. They are marketers running campaigns. Solo founders testing an offer. Freelancers building a quick demo for a client. No-code builders who can generate beautiful HTML but have never touched a terminal in their life. For them, the 45-second generation is followed by a loop that looks something like this: Tab 1: the AI chat with the HTML sitting there Tab 2: Netlify, where they get confused about “team names” and “project slugs” Tab 3: a YouTube tutorial from 2021 that references a UI that no longer exists Tab 4: Stack Overflow Tab 5: back to the AI asking how to deploy. The AI gives them terminal commands. They don’t have a terminal open. They close the tab. The HTML never goes live. This is not a skill problem It’s a tooling problem. The entire deploy workflow was designed by developers, for developers. Nobody designed the last mile for the person who just used AI…
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