“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.