Where are the grownups in the room?
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...
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.
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.
I'm beginning to wonder how many of the "This was written by AI!" comments are AI-generated.
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.
could be summed up as "and not a single bit of productivity was had that day"
Meanwhile nothing actually changed and the result is pretty much the same anyways.
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!".
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 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?
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.
Kirby?
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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
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.
inesranzo•3h ago
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.
PunchyHamster•3h ago
sublinear•1h ago
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•1h ago
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.
d--b•3h ago
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•3h ago
(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•2h ago
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•2h ago
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.
arionmiles•1h ago
gregates•1h ago
> 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.