“You should never build a CMS”

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

(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.

(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.

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 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.

but a great job security engineerer!