“You should never build a CMS” | Hacker News Reader

“You should never build a CMS”

sanity.io

142 pointshandfuloflight109 comments

Lee is a marketer (not in title but in truth) for Cursor. He wrote a post to market their new CMS/WYSIWYG feature.

We spend ~$120/month on our CMS which hosts hundreds of people across different spaces.

Nobody manages it, it just works.

That’s why people build software so you don’t need someone like Lee to burn a weekend to build an extremely brittle proprietary system that may or may not actually work for the 3 people that use it.

Engineers love to build software, marketers working for gen ai companies love to point to a sector and say “just use us instead!”, just shuffling monthly spend bills around.

But after you hand roll your brittle thing that never gets updates but for some reason uses NextJS and it’s exploited by the nth bug and the marketer that built it is on to the next company suddenly the cheap managed service starts looking pretty good.

Anyway, it’s just marketing from both sides, embarrassing how easily people get one-shot by ads like this.

You see, although what you say makes sense, paid software can also be extremely brittle systems. The only benefit is you can put the blame on someone else, which for the corporate life is a great hack. But that is not good engineering, much less use NextJS which is the same problem.

Customized software is as good as the team developing them are and trusting others to do that is proven to not work all the time, React proving it to all of us the last days with 4 different CVEs.

yep and thankfully Lee will always be at cursor and definitely not switch companies in the future

the chance of the software that does one thing well being maintained by the dedicated company is higher than the chance of Lee not switching jobs once the once vesting cliff has been reached again

if only Lee can maintain it, Lee is a terrible software engineer.

fair but how many engineers join cursor to maintain their weekend built jank CMS that was put together as part of a marketing stunt

just quietly move that back to a CMS so you can get back to building more interesting things, nobody actually wants to maintain a CMS

but a great job security engineerer!

(I wrote the original post) I'm a developer, but you can call me a marketer if you want. I don't think it changes the point of my post.

The point was that bad abstractions can be easily replaced by AI now, and this might work well for some people/companies who were in a similar situation as me. I was not trying to say you don't need a CMS at all. In fact, I recommended most people still use one.

What you describe as an "extremely brittle proprietary system" is working great for us, and that's all that I care about. I don't "love to build software" for the sake of building software. The post is about solving a problem of unnecessary complexity.

It’s been a week, two? The value of the post likely is greater than the value of the migration at this point.

The real test in any system is scaling usage across many different use cases and users.

But you did your job, it’s driving clicks and views, pushing the narrative that you don’t need x vertical, you just need cursor.

What software do you think shouldn’t be rebuilt and replaced with cursor?

Because if it’s all cursor, at some point you have eaten all your customers.

(I wrote the response) Just because it's marketing, doesn't mean it can also be educational?

I am a marketer and a developer. But I also know that you don't get far by trying to trick people into your product. As a marketer, I also get front row seat seeing how software plays out for a lot of businesses out there, and I have done so for a lot of years. I wanted to share those perspectives in response to Lee's write-up.

So yes, obviously both these pieces make a case for how the software we're employed by solves problems. And anyone who has been in developer marketing for a while knows that the best strategy is to educate and try to do so with credibility.

I built a CMS back in 2010 in Ruby on Rails (it powered a once popular site that I shut down for unrelated personal reasons). It originally used a thin layer of javascript along with a few buttons to wrap around some HTML. I later extended it to use markdown for fast editing. I didn't spend more than maybe 3-5 days on the entire project, including testing/deployment, and it stood up for over a decade until I retired it due to reasons mentioned.

I bring that up because when I see headlines like this, I know EXACTLY the type of person who wrote the content.

For my part, there were a few occasional issues/bugs early on, however I was able to catch them and fix them quicky thanks to testing, user input, and understanding of the code base.

Side note: I still own the domain. It sits on Cloudflare and resolves to an IP address which isn't valid. The AI traffic that has been hitting my domain has been about 4X the user base I had. This isn't CF spitting this number out...I've verified it.

Thankfully CF doesn't really have usage limits that folks like me would ever notice.

I thought this was a classy response. It’s very hard to address the original points of criticism without coming across as too defensive, but he managed to do it well. On top of that the author is kind of speaking on behalf of the whole CMS industry, which when all taken together certainly has a lot of issues. He made a good case for his product without trashing his competitors.

I would have appreciated if he asked me before using my name in the post. Especially after I intentionally did not mention them by name at all. Was trying to avoid talking about any one company.

Your original post was very public under a very well known brand - you have no expectation of privacy after that. People are going to respond to you publicly.

It's not about a privacy, but common courtesy. Especially after I gave them a heads up in DM about the post and offered to answer any more questions they had. They said they'd reach back out, then didn't, then posted this publicly? Really strange.

Fair point, we appreciated that courtesy, and I should have reached out first. That was a miss on my part.

My thinking was that it became public pretty quickly once your post went viral (folks were already connecting the dots in the replies), and it felt awkward to respond to the substance without being direct about the context.

But you're right that a heads-up would have been the better move.

Why do you need to use Git as a CMS?

That seems backwards and hellish when you want to grow your content and marketing team as they have no clue on how to use this arcane tool.

Now the engineers would need to be bothered by the marketing department time and time again to add blog posts, wasting engineering time.

This is the reason why CMS's like Sanity, Wordpress, Directus exist.

using Git as a CMS doesn't make sense at scale.

Git can make sense, but you still need to wrap it for non-technical people. No matter how easy markup is, some people still will refuse to learn it and ask for WYSIWYG tools

I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical person is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are a subset of the people now near or at retirement age.

It's almost 2026. There are more people who know how to code than ever before. This stuff is taught in every school now. Everyone has access to AI to help them if they get stuck. If someone under 50 is unwilling to work I am unwilling to employ.

A huge number of those people only interact with computers as a consumer. Beyond that, maybe schools assignments, texting and other social media, light email, and video games (eg through steam or a console). There is a big gap between that and someone comfortable using git.

Don’t be an asshole to them about that, think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone. Obviously they can learn it, but they know they’re going to be bad at it for a while (true for both git and phone calls) and they don’t know how long it’s going to take, or the extent of what they don’t know.

The thing about software companies is that they know how to automate and build stuff so why invest the time in learning a CMS if it’s something they could quickly solve for their own use case? Well, the same applies to people who just want to point and click and write, wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does.

> think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone

Think about all the developers we force into that situation all the time anyway.

> they know how to automate and build stuff

To an extent, yes, but as the author said "content management" is a complex problem.

> wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does

This is the crux of the problem. Versioning is fundamental to project management for the kind of project you'd use a CMS for, yet with a CMS everyone is too siloed and the oversimplified interface ruins any chance of doing better. Any CMS is a dead end that leads to chronically incorrect assets, incomplete patches, broken links, etc. This is also generally true for many other low/no-code solutions.

I'm not saying the "non-technical" people need to work directly in git, but they do need to be familiar with this kind of workflow when discussing with developers, and developers are absolutely still needed. Any CMS workflow is too restrictive. Nobody experienced and sane would prefer it over a git based solution unless they're being bullied into using a CMS. It's been like this forever and no CMS has ever been able to overcome this reputation.

At some point one needs to ask why a CMS is preferred and time and time again the answer is only cost cutting. In any other business decision that reason wouldn't be good enough. CMS products only exist because of neglect, ignorance, and cheapness.

> I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical person is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are a subset of the people now near or at retirement age.

This is a parochial viewpoint that only describes the bubble you're living in.

I've been shocked when talking to younger people who have -never used a computer that wasn't their phone-. People genuinely interested in cs degrees that needed to be taught how to use the computer first. These are not "dumb" or "unwilling" folks they just have grown up in a way I don't recognize and didn't expect. I assume it's the equivalent of how I've gone to a library to do research at most a half dozen times in my life despite doing lots and lots of reading, learning, and writing - my world just does not look like "do that at the library" anymore even though probably folks just 10 years older were almost exclusively there.

I think you're painting with too broad of a brush if your goal is an accurate model of the world here.

Ah, this is fun.

The article is about how people shouldn’t build CMSs because they’re building things that are too simple, missing tons features and not realizing the scope of what they get into.

But one thing that CMSs may want to have is “proper version control”. So what do they do? They are faced with 2 options: using a complete version control system like git, which allows them to do branches and merges and PR reviews and so on. Or they build something simpler internally, with only draft/publish, like they usually do.

But what if 2 marketers are making changes to the same file at the same time? one because the name of a product changed, and one because there is a new christmas sale. Does the version system handle merging? Maybe… maybe not…

The point I am making is that we always make the tradeoffs of buying off-the-shelf complex stuff vs internally built, incomplete buggy but tailor-made solutions.

And CMS is very much a space where customability matters.

BTW, Github Pages is a git-backed “CMS” used by millions of people. It works fine.

It seems like the argument is roughly: we used to use CMS because we had comms & marketing people who don't know git. But we plan to replace them all with ChatGPT or Claude, which does. So now we don't need CMS.

(I didn't click through to the original post because it seems like another boring "will AI replace humans?" debate, but that's the sense I got from the repeated mention of "agents".)

Cursor replaced their CMS because Cursor is a 50-people team shipping content to one website. Cursor also has a "Designers are Developers" scenario so their entire team is well versed with git.

This setup is minimal and works for them for the moment, but the author argues (and reasonably well enough, IMO) that this won't scale when they have dedicated marketing and comms teams.

It's not at all about Cursor using the chance to replace a department with AI, the department doesn't exist in their case.

> Lee's argument for moving to code is that agents can work with code.

So do you think this is a misrepresentation of Lee's argument? Again, I couldn't be bothered to read the original, so I'm relying on this interpretation of the original.

There's no sense in answering your questions when you actively refuse to read the article. You're more susceptible to misunderstand the arguments given your apparent bias on AI-motivated downsizing, which I must reiterate is not covered in the article at all.

Alright you badgered me into reading the original and the linked post does not misinterpret it.

> Previously, we could @cursor and ask it to modify the code and content, but now we introduced a new CMS abstraction in between. Everything became a bit more clunky. We went back to clicking through UI menus versus asking agents to do things for us.

> With AI and coding agents, the cost of an abstraction has never been higher. I asked them: do we really need a CMS? Will people care if they have to use a chatbot to modify content versus a GUI?

> For many teams, the cost of the CMS abstraction is worth it. They need to have a portal where writers or marketers can log in, click a few buttons, and change the content.

> More importantly, the migration has already been worth it. The first day after, I merged a fix to the website from a cloud agent on my phone.

> The cost of abstractions with AI is very high.

The whole argument is about how it's easier to use agents to modify the website without a CMS in the way.

This is an AI company saying "if you buy our product you don't need a CMS" and a CMS company saying "nuh-uh, you still need a CMS".

The most interesting thing here is that the CMS company feels the need to respond to the AI company's argument publicly.

> This is an AI company saying "if you buy our product you don't need a CMS"

No, it isn't. The AI company was explicit about their use case not being a general one:

> "For many teams, the cost of the CMS abstraction is worth it. They need to have a portal where writers or marketers can log in, click a few buttons, and change the content. It’s been like this since the dawn of time (WordPress)."

> Alright you badgered me into reading the original

It's not "badgering" you to point out that your comments are pointless if they're just going to speculate about something you haven't read. But if you feel "badgered", you could just not comment next time, that way no-one will "badger" you.

I don't think that's the argument. The argument is that comms and marketing people don't know git, but now that they can use AI they will be able to use tools they couldn't use before.

Basically, if they ask for a change, can preview it, ask for follow ups if it's not what they wanted, then validate it when it's good, then they don't need a GUI.

yeah, but the scale at where it doesn't work is that the change is to propagate everywhere and git and grep are not the right tools for that.

I do believe that using Git GUI for those people should be perfectly fine and it would be good for business people in general to adopt Git for a lot of documents or content.

But forcing people to use the tool is not the way to go as ROI depends a lot on context of the company and lots of time just a CMS would be better bang for the buck.

I have built several small websites in the past that were updated by non tech people.

I have tried, believe me, to make CMS work. I really did. But every time the customer came back with “can I do this or that” and inevitably, it fell in a blind corner of the CMS engine I was trying to use.

In the end, I developped something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure, setup a dropbox auto sync, and let the customers write anything they needed using markdown for content and yaml for metadata.

Sure, it didn’t do a hundredth of what the cms did, but it did what the customers needed. it took me less time to build this than to actually install/understand a cms system.

If I did have AI back then, it would have been even faster for me to build that stuff.

At some point, it just helps you get shit done.

How did you manage training non-tech people to edit yaml and markdown files?

How did this solve the CMS not supporting something they needed?

Did it simply make customizing functionality easier, since you are in total control of the codebase?

I got them to install MacDown, which is a standalone Markdown editor with side by side editing (text on the left, render on the right), and print a cheat sheet for links and images. Markdown is very easy to write. Nowadays there's probably an opensource wysiwyg editor.

The yaml part was very simple, it was handling the links for the menu entries..

Yes the customers wanted customized functionalities, like different ways to access the same pages, in the same tree.

Like you have Menu Item 1 => SubMenu Item 2 => List Item 3 is the same as Menu Item 3 => SubMenu Item 1 => List Item 5. Very few CMS do this, as the usual is to have a non cyclic tree hierarchy.

Here I had a main hierarchy reflected in the folder structure, and then they could add some links to the menu tree with the yaml files.

The whole thing was very simple. It took me about 16 hours to set up the whole site.

> something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure

Kirby?

That was my first try, but many things were missing from Kirby for what the customer wanted.

I am curious what was possible with yaml+md files that was impossible with flat file CMS. Afaik flat file CMSes are basically glorified .md editors.

The markdown didn’t help with anything that CMS couldn’t do. But special sections of pages would render differently based on the yaml configs.

You may think of it as: for each page, the yaml contained the React props to render. I d write the the main components, and the user would inject content through yaml as they saw fit.

I built something similar recently [0] with help from Claude Code (in Zed). It is still only a rough prototype, but I have tried it out on non-techy people for a project, and it has worked better than anything I have tried prior (Wordpress, Hugo etc).

I mount the folder with the content so they always has easy access to add and modify the website directly from the file explorer. It is quite powerful because there is not friction. You hit save, and it is live. This can off course be a drawback too, it is quicker to mess up stuff, but that is a trade off I am willing to make in 95% of the use cases I deal with.

[0] https://forge.dmz.skyfritt.net/ruben/folderweb

This is written by a proprietary CMS company, so they may be slightly bias.

Author here! Of course, I'm biased!

But in that bias is a ton of experience in the CMS field and a lot of observation of actual teams trying to solve for content operations challenges. I think that's valuable to share, even if we happen to also sell a solution to these things.

The original article was written by an employee of an AI company, demonstrating that a CMS is not really needed when you can use AI. Both are probably biased, but nonetheless both articles are worth a read. Re-evaluating established patterns in the age of AI is an interesting thought exploration, from both sides.

> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.sanity.io (see the browser console for more information).

Oh. The irony.

Yeah, we're looking into it!

This is a great testament to why 75% of the web runs on WordPress. Most of the problem mentioned have been solved by wordpress for ages, but there’s an entire industry set on reinventing the wheel in ways that really baffle me. If your actual goal is to publish on the web in a sane and understandable way, wordpress solves the problem for the largest number of cases. Scalability is solved. Usability by non tech editors is solved. Draft and approval flow is solved. Caching and speed is solved. You want headless? Oh, turns out wordpress is actually GREAT for that too.

It’s not sexy I guess? But if the goal is “work done” instead of “tech wank to impress investors with complexity”, that’s a solution that works very well.

It also heavily depends on _what type of content_ your CMS is serving. Blog posts and static pages? Okay, sure, probably fine to bolt WP on top and be done with it.

But as a CMS to build out landing pages for an ecommerce site with 10s of thousands of SKUs? That's where things fall down. I'm not going to reimport my entire catalog into WooCommerce or something just to show a block of 8 products. Do the products also need to be localized for pricing and language? Plugins/custom glue code. PDP pages? Custom content per product based on various supplier disclosure requirements? Meh, at that point, I need to build so much custom stuff on top of WP that I'd actually be better off owning the entire stack and finding a way to use their block editor as a library within my own system.

I've worked heavily in my career with both WordPress and more custom PHP applications and while they each have their tradeoffs, I would never suggest someone to use WordPress at this stage unless they are just getting started and their data models fits without a ton of customization. However, if you're really just starting out, you'd be likely better off with Squarespace or Shopify until your business outgrows those platforms and you need custom software to take your business to the next level. For some businesses, WordPress might be the right answer as a CMS, but for others, they might be better served by other solutions.

The only people I can confidently recommend WP for at this point are actual bloggers who will just use the WordPress.com free tier, or a news organization looking for a high quality interface to publish long form content. For new businesses, you'll be better served by other platforms until you outgrow them and your business needs become complicated enough to warrant custom software.

Agree 100%. But while your case is valid, I have the impression hacker news often forgets that the average IT/web professional is often dealing with mid-size companies whose needs are not those of the front of the line startup that need to woo investors with technical complexity. Re your case, I develop wordpress solutions since 2010 and I would never touch anything like that with anything but ecommerce specific solutions. Never once suggested woocommerce to anyone, by the way, since I believe for example that for all the small-to-medium shop needs there are plenty of low code embeddable solutions that work better. And the minute you need a little more, then Shopify is quite a good option.

WordPress didn't solve anything. They just got the first.

They got there first, then as a result, they have:

- a big ecosystem of themes and plugins (especially for SEO)

- an army of contractors who can set it up for cheap, and don't know anything else

- users who know their way through the UI and don't even think about looking at alternatives

Nah, the likes of Drupal and others were established before Wordpress was launched, even longer if you consider Wordpress 1 & 2 were “blog software for blogs” more than the behemoth modern versions have become.

I think being later actually worked in their favor as they caught the wave that Drupal and others were too early for. They were simpler when a lot of new developers and clients were around and grew in complexity as what people did on the web did, while Drupal and co just seemed bloated, even though arguably modern versions of Wordpress with the plugin setups that are common now are even more complicated than those old version of their competitors at the start

Wordpress is nice, but not on the same league as Sitecore, AEM, Optimizely, Dynamics, and many other enterprise class CMS.

I guess those belong to the remaining 25%.

I would want to know if Sanity had permission from their former customer to tell the public they were a customer, along with the personal name of the customer. If not, they could be perceived to be somewhere on the dartboard of venn diagram slices that include "vendor trash-talking a former customer" to "violating customer trust by revealing the relationship" to "purposefully revealing customer PII in (insert jurisdiction here) by posting a personal X account". Potential and current customers (hint) would want to know. There are industries where corporate clients can be very secretive about who they buy things from, it's a competitive advantage, getting called out like that is extremely sensitizing, and so getting doxxed and dragged by a vendor like that is instant death, even when the customer publicly dragged the vendor first. Especially to markets of marketing people with the exact release date secrecy need that was described in the article (ironic).

The only source of this relatoinship reveal was Sanity, they did it in the tweet thread as well, and it was the first line of their blog post. They didn't say "well it emerged on X that we were the vendor for this", it appears to done without permission. If that's the case, it is beyond unclassy. They could have simply reciprocated the disconnection, not mentioned there was a relationship, and said in their own posts "some recent blogging and tweeting have started an interesting discussion about replacing CMS, and here's our take...".

Clients will be interested enough about these things to read every post when the reveal happens from the vendor side. I read every post on that thread, saw lots of people asking who it was. Leerob never revealed who it was or even hinted. But I never saw a tweet from either party that said "We talked about it among ourselves and decided it would be interesting for both of us and our communities to reveal that Sanity was the vendor of the CMS, and they have a take about how this has impacted them, which you can read at (url)".

None of that matters now. Only the doxx matters now. Lawyers salivate over these moments.

BTW this isn't the tenth time that moving to a mental model of "something as code" has completely and upsettingly (for some) disrupted a market, even before AI.

https://www.sanity.io/legal/privacy "To deidentify you before posting your feedback about the Sanity Services on our Site" ...ruh-roh (reasonable expectation).

https://www.sanity.io/legal/tos "Each Party (as “Receiving Party”) hereto acknowledges that the Confidential Information of the disclosing party (“Disclosing Party”) constitutes valuable confidential and proprietary information. ...ruh-roh x2 (foreknowledge of impact to damaged party)

Each Party will (i) hold the Confidential Information of the other Party in confidence, (ii) not disclose to any other person or use such Confidential Information or any part thereof" ...ruh-roh x 3 (promise of secrecy)

Is Cursor.com located in California? Why, yes they are. Is Sanity located in California? Yes, they are. ...ruh-roh x 4 (bonus venue for privacy laws).

At this point, the filing could be done by "lawyer as code".

I think there is a need for Agent-first tooling for things like CMS.

> Previously, we could @cursor and ask it to modify the code and content, but now we introduced a new CMS abstraction in between.

That is a very real benefit to having everything accessible by Agents. Whenever I need to setup connections in web UIs, it slows me down. IaC is a huge step in the right direction for Agent workflows, but so much is still locked away like CMS management, Confluence docs, Jira tickets, etc.

> Preview workflows are clunky. Draft modes, toolbar toggles, account requirements just to see what your content looks like before it goes live. Having to add data attributes everywhere to connect front ends with backend fields feels unnecessary. Real friction for something that feels it should be simple.

I was happy to read this part at first, because it highlights what I hate most about Headless CMS. Hearing a company in the industry admit to this problem gave me hope that they are now going to fix it or have better solutions. But no, the rest of this article is just rambling about how 'you don't really know about CMS'. I mean, if you know better than us do, then why can't the experience of using Headless CMS be better? You are here to solve the problem, right?

This story reminds me of a similar issue people love to solve with the same idea. Software builds. The can’t we have a simple make file or worse just a shell script to build.

And just like described in the post it starts the same. Simple script wrapper. No tasks no tasks dependencies. Then over time you need to built now a library which contains the core part of the software to share between different other projects. You need to publish to different platforms. Shell scripts become harder to use on windows all of a sudden. You need to built for different architectures and have to integrate platform specific libraries. You can built your simple make / shell file around all that. But it ain’t so simple anymore.

The idea is to have an 80/20 build system:

For the 80% of use cases, you have homogeneous build commands that are the same across projects (such as a makefile with build, clean, test, etc). This calls the real (complex) build system underneath to actually perform the action. You shouldn't need to type more than 15 keys to make it do common things (and you CERTAINLY shouldn't need to use ANY command line switches).

Then for the other 20% of (complex) use cases, you call the underlying build system directly, and have a document describing how the build system works and how to set up the dev environment (preferably with "make dev-env"). Maybe for self-bootstrapping systems like rust or go this isn't such a big deal, but for C/C++ or Python or node or Java or Mono it quickly becomes too bespoke and fiddly.

Then you include tests for those makefile level commands to make sure they actually work.

There's nothing worse than having to figure out (or remember) the magical incantation necessary to build/run some project among the 500 repos in 15 languages at a company, waiting for the repo owner to get back to you on why "./gradlew compileAndRun" and "/.gradlew buildAndRun" and "./gradlew devbuild" don't work - only to have them say "Oh, you just use ./gradlew -Pjava.version=11 -Dconfig.file=config/dev-use-this-one-instead.conf -Dskipdeploy buildAndDeploy - oh and make sure ImageMagick and Pandoc are installed. They're only used by the reports generator, but buildAndDeploy will error out without them". Wastes a ton of time.

Having Make shell out to the real build system is a nice compromise. Then you can stick your tests and stuff in there too

Yes. In the example of gradle I setup all specifics to the well know lifecycle tasks: check, assemble and in some cases publish. Some projects are more complicated specifically when you can really use the rule of: 1 project one assembly. See android with apk vs bundle. Here you may need more specific tasks. But I try to bind CI (be it Jenkins or GitHub actions) to only know the basic interface. But I meant specifically the believe that build systems and tooling around is too complicated and unnecessary.

Ah yes. Unfortunately the complexity is necessary in modern codebases. There are usually ways to simplify, but only to a point - after that all you're doing is smearing the complexity around rather than containing it.

I think it's good practise to build something CMS like for fun - as long as you don't expect it to be useful or used, outside of maybe your personal page. It's useful to experiment and learn stuff that might be useful at scale in other projects.

I intentionally made a few interesting choices for my stuff, just to see how far you can push it, and to make sure no sane person would ever use that in production (like, from before Markdown was around, I was wondering how far you can get with doing a simple markup language parsed by using regexp only. Turns out, surprisingly far, but if something doesn't parse as expected later on you have a bit of a problem)

2007, my employer is a magazine. I demand a blog. They decide to write one from scratch in .NET because we are a software magazine. 2010, said CMS is retired for Hubspot. Or maybe that happened later. Either way, to make me happy to have Hubspot is a feat. Also a great business angle for Hubspot: write your own shitty CMS? Welcome! And again, either way, 2017, bankruptcy. All money spent on CMS from inception to retirement could have been abated by a WordPress subscription. Definitely way above 6 figures lost. Coulda kept us alive for a few more years, anyway.

I believe the point is that AI or cursor/agent is your CMS. The points about structured content and references are valid but go away as AI improves.

> Give it six months. ... The "simple" system will accrete complexity because content management is complex.

Ah I was looking for the boogeyman threat and there it is.

I am so glad to see people finally getting away from all CMS platforms. They never worked well and have always caused a lot more problems than they solved. Everyone used them either out of ignorance or red tape.

No. Everyone used them because people editing the websites are almost never developers. Moving to some static site generator powered by git is cool until your marketing team constantly bothers your dev team to change a typo.

you literally need 1 guy who will check marketing's AI Cursor commits of the changed typo. way cheaper than paying for the CMS.

Imagine if that dev team could create some kind of hyper intelligent interface to git so powerful even a marketer could use it…

Like a couple icons and some basic platform scripts for the 99% use cases of picking a branch, adding content, and occasionally saying “oops”?

Or just hire people for your marketing team that have even a passing familiarity with web dev? They're not even that hard to find.

Keep those initial hires aboard and train up the rest. Get rid of the ones who don't want to learn. I mean really why do we try so hard to avoid bridging such simple knowledge gaps? It's not a big deal and we shouldn't shut people out of career development under all these obviously false excuses.

You are forgetting that the websites/CMS is often tool for the organization. It's not just about publishing the content. CMSes are used for writing and editing. Event spaces use their website for planning, chefs use it to generate printed menus.

Static site generators are good for some usecases but too little or too niche for most cases.

Whats with the git obsession?

Modern CMS workflows separate the content from the website code/app. The code is always version controlled and for content most CMSes have some sort of content versioning.

There is no way around needing a developer (and a lot of testing) to "just fix a typo".

First the typo is discovered and it changes the length of the text. If it's more than a few words this becomes a layout problem. You will have to nudge things around a bit, but now this also fails accessibility testing because the alt text or aria labels were overlooked or font size or line height were changed. Then the marketing team reviews it and change their minds yet again and people are stuck in a hellish loop of tiny updates that start breaking other things through runaway inconsistency. Of course it's worth noting that the typos almost always originate from that same marketing team.

This is the nature of coding websites by committee. A CMS just makes this worse by getting in the way of proper versioning, and as a bonus launders all the blame onto developers.

It's far from naive to just use git and set up a CI pipeline to copy your static build onto a web server. This is done all the time by anyone with common sense and familiarity with web dev. It "just works" so well that it remains under the radar to anyone new to this and looking for solutions. The CMS grift continues as their sales team insists their product is the best solution.

I see you had a bad experience with CMSs but in reality vast majority of content websites use CMS and are for entities that have 0 developers. There is simply no way for them to use some homebaked static site generator script that you personally see as easier solution.

And those sites can be pretty great. The pace of dev is just different. Usually with big initial investment and then some bulk fixup in few months or a year.

I am actually not sure why to hate CMSs good modern ones are basically sweet web framework with highly customisible admin panel.

If I see an admin panel I have to assume this would be server side rendered? I would never agree with that, and you're missing my point.

I am not suggesting any framework at all.

I'm 100% serious when I say that you will inevitably need a developer. As the requirements become more refined they're going to wind up writing everything on those web pages from scratch in plain CSS, HTML, and JS. Every attempt to avoid this is just wasting time and pissing everyone off regardless of their stake in it.

As an aside, I've knocked out at least half a dozen of these projects that I can remember in the past decade and I'm not even really a web dev. Doing it my way was faster, cheaper, more accurate, and way less long-term maintenance.

They were all for significant clients and are still running today. When they need maintenance it's done by developers who can effortlessly knock out the tickets because there are no dependencies in the way. There is no dedicated team. The client managers just toss some stories into the backlog and it goes into the next sprint assigned to whoever has the time. A merge in gitlab updates everything and we're done and everyone is happy and nobody ever has to think hard about this.

We just write static pages from scratch and avoid all server side rendering. There is no backend apart from maybe a few REST calls where needed and they're implemented as separate node apps. Again, minimal dependencies apart from Express and misc utils. They could probably be lambdas in AWS if we were allowed to do it that way. That's how non-existent the backend is and how static the pages are.

Am I just living in a corporate fantasy and don't know how good I have it? The only part where I think we agree is that these projects should be low tech, but we have very different ideas of what that means.

Also, the part where I mention marketing being a shit show clown circus is still true, but avoiding a CMS keeps that noise away from devs where it belongs while still delivering a good result. This assumes you have devs. If you don't I still think you need at least a single web contractor and would be better off avoiding a CMS or any other shitty framework. That's all I'm saying.

And their websites are total dog shit and probably a legal nightmare waiting to happen because of it.

I'm not siding with the author for any interest in CMS but that comment is natural for anyone who thinks someone made a good enough short term decision which might backfire after the realities settle in.

And they didn't threat anything, they simply said: your simple system won't be too simple anymore as you keep on using it. To me it's a fair comment.

Of course, it might not backfire but predictions are personal and not always correct.

This person gets it! This is an old trope of promoting complexity under the guise of doing each and every feature someone from marketing or legal or some other dept asks for. Instead if companies focus on minimalism and creative thinking to solve some interesting needs, it becomes clear that a CMS is bloatware and unnecessary

UI first approach is dying. I don’t even want to touch it if possible, if cursor can solve it for me.

Can you give some examples of this?

Maybe for developers, but I can't imagine most people going back to the terminal. The smartphones won and has the largest market. It would be especially awkward to use a terminal on a touch display. Maybe with voice this will be easier, but I doubt people want to go around in public talking and giving instructions to their phone. UIs are here to stay.

I do not use terminal. Cursor is IDE. The point is not Cursor either. But AI agents with smart model like Opus 4.5, who does heavy work.

“You should never build a bad CMS.”

Market for CMS in public open source arena is saturated. This requires time invested in learning one-offs.

Build one that is properly whiteboarded and engineered from the start, and subsequently gets purchased by an enterprise for an app platform.

Part on Git not being content collaboration tool is just wrong.

Code merges are extremely semantic. Changes over multiple files/places in project are the norm.

Feels like author went on defensive mode against Git. But he is quite right on other points.

In what way are they semantic? Can you avoid a conflict if 2 people change the names of 2 different variables on one line as these are semantically unrelated changes? Does git do crdt?

Mux was getting a bit too expensive for the way we were using it, so I wrote a Sanity plugin for video hosting on Bunny CDN, it’s been fantastic!

I haven’t read the article but it was funny because did someone trap me in a matrix where building a CMS is bad?

If anyone from sanity is reading this. Please for the love of god fix the rich text editor. It’s a great CMS for everything but writing text.

We're fixing every week! Have you tried it recently? Are there particular issues you're having?

The point about CMSs having value in possibly being a more real-time collaborative UI layer to interact with that's less-scary for the average Joe is a valid driver; and is a critical factor for many use cases. But the the other stuff is clearly reasoning with a solution already in mind...

"All blog posts mentioning feature Y published after September...[more examples]...The three most recent case studies in the finance category...[etc]"

Fairly simple queries. If you're willing to build an MCP server (as they did for their solution), you could just as well build one that reads structured front matter.

"You can't. You'd need to parse frontmatter, understand your date format, resolve the category references, handle the sorting, limit the results. At which point you've built a query engine."

Well that's a scoped problem. Looks like it already exists (e.g., https://markdowndb.com/) and doesn't require moving away from Markdown files in GIT if you want.

Or use something like content collection in astro (https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/). Hell, looks like that lets you have the MD files somewhere else instead of git if you please.

The AI-generated points aren't as compelling as the prompter thinks. A new common problem.

Yes, you don't need flatfile-committed raw text for AI tools to work properly, in part because of things like MCP servers. Yes, semantically linked content with proper metadata enables additional use cases.

The next point to make would be "if you use our thing, you don't need to think about this", but instead goes into a highly debatable rant about markdown in git not being able to fulfil those additional use cases on a practical level.

This distracts from the what I imagine is the real intent: "git and markdown files don't come automagically with a snazzy collaborative UI. And yes you can still use AI, and use it well out of the box. If someone tells you you need markdown in git to do x,y,z with AI they are wrong."

Personally, I can get over the "AI writing style", but only if the content still nails the salient point...

reading these comments - wow, absolutely nobody has an idea what a CMS is. if your going to "replace it with cursor" or "AI" you've completely lost the plot as a software engineer

you guys do realize that WordPress (as much as I hate its ubiquitous existence) is the CMS model?

and still something like 40% of all pages on the internet

The font rendering is all kinds of fucked with Firefox impossible to read.

Ooof. We should fix that!

Same in Brave. This is a recurring problem with various sites that I have not been able to get to the bottom of. Best described as a "bouncy vertical kerning problem" but I'm making that term up.

I'm really getting tired of gen AI and this article is like a perfect microcosm. Partially or at least fully AI generated, discussing a vibe-coded CMS built by an AI startup. It's several layers of marketing and no serious engineering.

Where are the grownups in the room?

It does read very LLM-y to me, too. The short sentences, dramatic pauses – but maybe I'm oversensitive nowadays, it's really hard to tell at times.

There are some obvious tells like the headings ("Markdown is nice for LLMs. That’s not the point", "What Lee actually built (spoiler: a CMS)"), the dramatic full stops ("\nThis works until it doesn't.\n"), etc. It's difficult to describe because it's sort of a gut feeling you have pattern matching what you get from your own LLM usage.

It sort of reminds me of those marketing sites I used to see selling a product, where it's a bunch of short paragraphs and one-liners, again difficult to articulate but those were ubiquitous like 5 years ago and I can see where AI would have learned it from.

It's also tough because if you're a good writer you can spot it easier and you can edit LLM output to hide it, but then you probably aren't leaning on LLM's to write for you anyways. But if you aren't a good writer or your English isn't strong you won't pick up on it, and even if you use the AI to just rework your own writing or generate fragments it still leaks through.

Now that I think about it I'm curious if this phenomenon exists in other languages besides English...

Author here.

I don't know folks... Maybe I have been dabbling so much with AI the last couple of years that I have started taking on its style.

I had my digits on the keyboard for this piece though.

I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for sure because I can see it's style rubbing off.

Someone linked this article you wrote from 7 years ago.

https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-...

It's well written and obviously human made. Curious what you think as to the differences.

This article is just about as un-AI written as anything I've ever read. The headings are clearly just the outline that he started with. An outline with a clear concept for the story that he's trying to tell.

I'm beginning to wonder how many of the "This was written by AI!" comments are AI-generated.

It's strange to see folks here speculate about something you've written.

And if you only knew how much those headings and the structure of this post changed as I wrote it out and got internal feedback on it ^^_

I struggled a bit with what to point to as signs that it's not an LLM conception. Someone else had commented on the headlines as something that was AI-like, and since I could easily imagine a writing process that would lead to headlines like that, that's what I chose. A little too confidently perhaps, sorry.

But actually, I think I shouldn't have needed to identify any signs. It's the people claiming something's the work of an LLM based on little more than gut feelings, that should be asked to provide more substance. The length of sentences? Number of bullet points? That's really thin.

I don't think people should be obligated to spend time and effort justifying their reasoning on this. Firstly it's highly asymmetrical; you can generate AI content with little effort, whereas composing a detailed analysis requires a lot more work. It's also not easily articulatable.

However there is evidence that writers who have experience using LLMs are highly accurate at detecting AI generated text.

> Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such “expert” annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluated even in the presence of evasion tactics like paraphrasing and humanization. Qualitative analysis of the experts’ free-form explanations shows that while they rely heavily on specific lexical clues, they also pick up on more complex phenomena within the text that are challenging to assess for automatic detectors. [0]

Like the paper says, it's easy to point to specific clues in ai generated text, like the overuse of em dashes, overuse of inline lists, unusual emoji usage, tile case, frequent use of specific vocab, the rule of three, negative parallelisms, elegant variation, false ranges etc. But harder to articulate and perhaps more important to recognition is overall flow, sentence structure and length, and various stylistic choices that scream AI.

Also worth noting that the author never actually stated that they did not use generative AI for this article. Saying that their hands were on the keyboard or that they reworked sentences and got feedback from coworkers doesn't mean AI wasn't used. That they haven't straight up said "No AI was used to write this article" is another indication.

0: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v2

> Also worth noting that the author never actually stated that they did not use generative AI for this article.

I expect that they did in some small way, especially considering the source.

But not to an extent where it was anywhere near as relevant as the actual points being made. "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances,", the guidelines say.

I don't mind at all that it's pointed out when an article is nothing more than AI ponderings. Sure, call out AI fluff, and in particular, call out an article that might contain incorrect confabulated information. This just wasn't that.

If only we could take output and reverse-engineer activation layers through some parameters and get the original prompt. Imagine how much time we could save if we could read the chat transcript or the two actually human-written paragraphs this article was based on. They'd be some banal rant about a DevRel dude but at least it'd be more efficient.

Would be nice but you could probably edit it enough or splice different chat outputs together to break it.

Honestly with the way the world is going, you might as well just ask AI to generate the chat logs from the article. Who cares if it's remotely accurate, doesn't seem like anyone cares when it comes to anything else anyways.

As I read it I was just thinking "whoa, someone really just decided to pawn their site design off to AI, then complain it doesn't get CMS, then build CMS purely so they can yell their requests at the AI, and so the company making the CMS pawned off to AI writing article why using AI isn't a great way to click at their CMS"

could be summed up as "and not a single bit of productivity was had that day"

It's like a reflection of Nvidia, Oracle and, OpenAI selling each other products and just trading the same money back and forth. Which is of course a reflection of the classic economist joke about eating poo in the forest. "GDP is up though!"

Meanwhile nothing actually changed and the result is pretty much the same anyways.

It didn't read as LLM-generated to me. And having some experience with CMS development, the article has plenty of substance. You can check previous blog articles from the same author far predating LLMs - here's one from 2018: https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-.... The main difference i see with the OP article is it's a bit more emotive - probably a result of responding to a public trashing of their product.

The main point I'd like to raise in this comment though is that one of us is wrong - maybe me or you - and our internal LLM radar / vibe check is not as strong as we think. That worries me a bit. Probably LLM accusations are now becoming akin to the classic "You're a corporate shill!".

Comparing the two articles, they have a completely different style. I wasn't totally convinced the linked article was AI generated but I am now. Clearly the author can write, so I'm a bit saddened that they used an LLM for this article

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