“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.

(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.