“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 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.