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throwaway12345t
kmelve
(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.
leerob
(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.
throwaway12345t
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.
eek2121
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.
brazukadev
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.
throwaway12345t
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
brazukadev
if only Lee can maintain it, Lee is a terrible software engineer.
JSR_FDED
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.
leerob
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.
kmelve
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.
kikki
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.
leerob
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.
inesranzo
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.
d--b
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.
gregates
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".)
arionmiles
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.
gregates
> 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.
eloisant
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.
fragmede
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.
PunchyHamster
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
sublinear
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.
weitendorf
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.
collingreen
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.
antonvs
> 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.
ozim
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.
d--b
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.
rsolva
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.
faeyanpiraat
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?
d--b
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.
mabedan
> something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure
Kirby?
RobotToaster
This is written by a proprietary CMS company, so they may be slightly bias.
kmelve
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.
mmcnl
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.
jrgd
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.sanity.io (see the browser console for more information).
Oh. The irony.
kmelve
Yeah, we're looking into it!
camillomiller
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.
beezlewax
WordPress didn't solve anything. They just got the first.
Macha
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
eloisant
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
yurishimo
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.
camillomiller
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.
pjmlp
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%.
poppafuze
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.
poppafuze
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".
undefined
odie5533
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.
undefined
novoreorx
> 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?
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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.