- Garrett Galow of WorkOS said AI made building internal apps easy, but deploying and securing them still needed engineers.
- WorkOS built a platform that hides infrastructure and puts apps behind company sign-in. Galow said 37% of its 60 apps had no engineer commits.
Building an internal app with AI is now cheap, said Garrett Galow, a product manager at WorkOS. Getting it to coworkers safely is not, he argued on the AI Engineer podcast. He said AI solved the build problem, but shipping still needed engineers until WorkOS built a platform for it.
What was said
Galow began with a story. A sales account executive built a helpful chatbot with Lovable, an AI app builder, before going on leave. The CEO could not open it. Engineers had to recode, deploy and manage it.
His diagnosis: "But shipping it, making it available, even internally to your company, hasn't really gotten that much easier." A non-engineer may lack access to the company's hosting accounts. Nobody wants API keys, the secret passwords software uses, checked into shared code.
WorkOS built two things. WOW is a command-line tool pushed to every laptop. One command sets up Git, the code repository, the tools and a template. Atlas is the platform underneath. It puts each app behind company single sign-on and makes each one easy to find. It also gives apps data access, such as Snowflake, without the builder handling API keys.
Galow said 37% of 60 apps had no engineer in any commit. Over 3 million requests a week run through them, partly from machines and agents. He summed up: "For us, AI solved the build problem, but we needed more in order to make this a ubiquitous platform for our team."
Why it matters
Our reading: the scarce work has moved from writing code to the plumbing around it, meaning hosting, sign-in and secrets. Each is a judgment a non-engineer cannot easily make, so the platform makes it once for everyone. The thesis that whoever makes shipping invisible and safe may capture the gain from non-engineer builders is ours, not Galow's. If you buy AI app builders, ask where apps run and who can open them.
At WorkOS hackathons, non-engineers build while paired engineers consult. Galow presented safety as a platform default, not a builder's task. But default sign-in is not per-app access control, which he said is still planned.
The other side
Galow works for the vendor and closed with a sales invitation. The figures are his company's own, and he called this an initial version. The 37% also means most apps had engineer commits. He conceded that not every app should be open to everyone, since some hold sensitive data. Group and role permissions are still planned. He also asked how a team knows an app works. The excerpts answer only with hackathon feedback. They do not say who reviews quality or maintains apps over time.
Written by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance, and checked by our editorial review: every quotation was verified against the recording's transcript. How we use AI.
The conversation this talking point comes from
- AI Engineer: Let Anyone at Your Company Ship Internal Apps with AI — Garrett Galow, WorkOS (2026-10-08)
