I manage websites and applications for clients, many of which are built by contracted developers. Since AI-assisted coding became widely available, I've started building smaller apps myself, and I'm now considering rebuilding a client's entire website this way. The project would include public and member-only areas, event registration, a data portal, and a document library for an industry association with a few hundred users. There won't be payments, but security and reliability still matter because any incident could damage my reputation and affect the client. My current workflow is to use an AI coding assistant, develop and test on staging, then manually push changes live. Would it be reasonable to hire a web developer to manage the hosting, deployment pipeline, and production releases while I continue building the application? Or would developers reasonably object to deploying code they didn't write, especially if it was AI-generated? My main concern is that I have limited technical knowledge and don't fully understand every part of the application, so I'd like an experienced developer involved before anything reaches production.
4 Answers
A developer may agree to this, but the concern is liability rather than annoyance. If the application is poorly structured or has hidden bugs, they can end up blamed for an outage despite having no control over the code. A better arrangement is to hire them as a release gate: they verify that the exact commit can be built and deployed, run the required checks, review critical areas, and have permission to block a release that is not production-ready.
That can work, but only if the scope is defined very clearly. The developer could own the hosting, CI/CD pipeline, server configuration, backups, monitoring, and rollback process, while you remain responsible for application code and fixing bugs in that code. They should not be treated as an on-call debugger whenever a broken build reaches production. Put the handoff process, testing expectations, and responsibility for failures in writing.
A simple release document helps a lot: you provide a specific commit from staging, the developer deploys it, and either side knows exactly who handles rollback, infrastructure failures, and application bugs.
If you only need someone to move known-good code from staging to production, an automated deployment platform may be cheaper and more reliable than hiring a developer for every release. But you still need someone qualified to design the environment, configure secrets and permissions, set up backups and health checks, test rollback, and review the security of the application. In practice, you’re looking for DevOps support plus a limited application security review, not merely someone to press the deploy button.
Deployment by itself does not make insecure code safe. For this kind of site, the important risks are authentication, authorization, member-data access, file uploads, session handling, exposed secrets, and database migrations. I’d budget for a proper security and architecture review before launch, rather than assuming the person managing production will automatically catch problems in the application.
For a small static site, deployment-only is pretty routine. Once you add member accounts, private documents, registrations, and a data portal, it becomes a shared engineering responsibility rather than just pushing files to a server.