_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) âYou should never build a CMSâ
The_President wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
âYou should never build a bad CMS.â
Market for CMS in public open source arena is saturated. This requires
time invested in learning one-offs.
Build one that is properly whiteboarded and engineered from the start,
and subsequently gets purchased by an enterprise for an app platform.
poppafuze wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
I would want to know if Sanity had permission from their former
customer to tell the public they were a customer, along with the
personal name of the customer. If not, they could be perceived to be
somewhere on the dartboard of venn diagram slices that include "vendor
trash-talking a former customer" to "violating customer trust by
revealing the relationship" to "purposefully revealing customer PII in
(insert jurisdiction here) by posting a personal X account". Potential
and current customers (hint) would want to know. There are industries
where corporate clients can be very secretive about who they buy things
from, it's a competitive advantage, getting called out like that is
extremely sensitizing, and so getting doxxed and dragged by a vendor
like that is instant death, even when the customer publicly dragged the
vendor first. Especially to markets of marketing people with the exact
release date secrecy need that was described in the article (ironic).
The only source of this relatoinship reveal was Sanity, they did it in
the tweet thread as well, and it was the first line of their blog post.
They didn't say "well it emerged on X that we were the vendor for
this", it appears to done without permission. If that's the case, it
is beyond unclassy. They could have simply reciprocated the
disconnection, not mentioned there was a relationship, and said in
their own posts "some recent blogging and tweeting have started an
interesting discussion about replacing CMS, and here's our take...".
Clients will be interested enough about these things to read every post
when the reveal happens from the vendor side. I read every post on
that thread, saw lots of people asking who it was. Leerob never
revealed who it was or even hinted. But I never saw a tweet from
either party that said "We talked about it among ourselves and decided
it would be interesting for both of us and our communities to reveal
that Sanity was the vendor of the CMS, and they have a take about how
this has impacted them, which you can read at (url)".
None of that matters now. Only the doxx matters now. Lawyers salivate
over these moments.
BTW this isn't the tenth time that moving to a mental model of
"something as code" has completely and upsettingly (for some) disrupted
a market, even before AI.
poppafuze wrote 3 hours 53 min ago:
[1] "To deidentify you before posting your feedback about the Sanity
Services on our Site" ...ruh-roh (reasonable expectation). [2]
"Each Party (as âReceiving Partyâ) hereto acknowledges that the
Confidential Information of the disclosing party (âDisclosing
Partyâ) constitutes valuable confidential and proprietary
information. ...ruh-roh x2 (foreknowledge of impact to damaged party)
Each Party will (i) hold the Confidential Information of the other
Party in confidence, (ii) not disclose to any other person or use
such Confidential Information or any part thereof" ...ruh-roh x 3
(promise of secrecy)
Is Cursor.com located in California? Why, yes they are. Is Sanity
located in California? Yes, they are. ...ruh-roh x 4 (bonus venue
for privacy laws).
At this point, the filing could be done by "lawyer as code".
(HTM) [1]: https://www.sanity.io/legal/privacy
(HTM) [2]: https://www.sanity.io/legal/tos
interstice wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
Mux was getting a bit too expensive for the way we were using it, so I
wrote a Sanity plugin for video hosting on Bunny CDN, itâs been
fantastic!
samyar wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
I havenât read the article but it was funny because did someone trap
me in a matrix where building a CMS is bad?
throwaway12345t wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
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.
Thatâs why people build software so you donât 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 âjust use us instead!â,
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 itâs 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, itâs just marketing from both sides, embarrassing how easily
people get one-shot by ads like this.
kmelve wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
(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.
leerob wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
(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.
throwaway12345t wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Itâs 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, itâs driving clicks and views, pushing the
narrative that you donât need x vertical, you just need cursor.
What software do you think shouldnât be rebuilt and replaced with
cursor?
Because if itâs all cursor, at some point you have eaten all your
customers.
brazukadev wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
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.
throwaway12345t wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
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
brazukadev wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
if only Lee can maintain it, Lee is a terrible software engineer.
throwaway12345t wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
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
VonGuard wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
2007, my employer is a magazine. I demand a blog. They decide to write
one from scratch in .NET because we are a software magazine. 2010, said
CMS is retired for Hubspot. Or maybe that happened later. Either way,
to make me happy to have Hubspot is a feat. Also a great business angle
for Hubspot: write your own shitty CMS? Welcome! And again, either way,
2017, bankruptcy. All money spent on CMS from inception to retirement
could have been abated by a WordPress subscription. Definitely way
above 6 figures lost. Coulda kept us alive for a few more years,
anyway.
jrgd wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading
www.sanity.io (see the browser console for more information).
Oh. The irony.
kmelve wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
Yeah, we're looking into it!
ozim wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
Part on Git not being content collaboration tool is just wrong.
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.
eviks wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
In what way are they semantic? Can you avoid a conflict if 2 people
change the names of 2 different variables on one line as these are
semantically unrelated changes? Does git do crdt?
JSR_FDED wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
I thought this was a classy response. Itâs very hard to address the
original points of criticism without coming across as too defensive,
but he managed to do it well. On top of that the author is kind of
speaking on behalf of the whole CMS industry, which when all taken
together certainly has a lot of issues. He made a good case for his
product without trashing his competitors.
leerob wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
I would have appreciated if he asked me before using my name in the
post. Especially after I intentionally did not mention them by name
at all. Was trying to avoid talking about any one company.
kmelve wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
Fair point, we appreciated that courtesy, and I should have reached
out first. That was a miss on my part.
My thinking was that it became public pretty quickly once your post
went viral (folks were already connecting the dots in the replies),
and it felt awkward to respond to the substance without being
direct about the context.
But you're right that a heads-up would have been the better move.
kikki wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
Your original post was very public under a very well known brand -
you have no expectation of privacy after that. People are going to
respond to you publicly.
leerob wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
It's not about a privacy, but common courtesy. Especially after I
gave them a heads up in DM about the post and offered to answer
any more questions they had. They said they'd reach back out,
then didn't, then posted this publicly? Really strange.
fullstackchris wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
reading these comments - wow, absolutely nobody has an idea what a CMS
is. if your going to "replace it with cursor" or "AI" you've completely
lost the plot as a software engineer
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
ianberdin wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
UI first approach is dying.
I donât even want to touch it if possible, if cursor can solve it for
me.
o_m wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
Maybe for developers, but I can't imagine most people going back to
the terminal. The smartphones won and has the largest market. It
would be especially awkward to use a terminal on a touch display.
Maybe with voice this will be easier, but I doubt people want to go
around in public talking and giving instructions to their phone. UIs
are here to stay.
ianberdin wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
I do not use terminal.
Cursor is IDE. The point is not Cursor either. But AI agents with
smart model like Opus 4.5, who does heavy work.
beezlewax wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
Can you give some examples of this?
swazzy wrote 11 hours 11 min ago:
I believe the point is that AI or cursor/agent is your CMS.
The points about structured content and references are valid but go
away as AI improves.
finaard wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
I think it's good practise to build something CMS like for fun - as
long as you don't expect it to be useful or used, outside of maybe your
personal page. It's useful to experiment and learn stuff that might be
useful at scale in other projects.
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)
sublinear wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
> Give it six months. ... The "simple" system will accrete complexity
because content management is complex.
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.
morsmodr wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
This person gets it! This is an old trope of promoting complexity
under the guise of doing each and every feature someone from
marketing or legal or some other dept asks for. Instead if companies
focus on minimalism and creative thinking to solve some interesting
needs, it becomes clear that a CMS is bloatware and unnecessary
xandrius wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
I'm not siding with the author for any interest in CMS but that
comment is natural for anyone who thinks someone made a good enough
short term decision which might backfire after the realities settle
in.
And they didn't threat anything, they simply said: your simple system
won't be too simple anymore as you keep on using it. To me it's a
fair comment.
Of course, it might not backfire but predictions are personal and not
always correct.
omnimus wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
No. Everyone used them because people editing the websites are almost
never developers. Moving to some static site generator powered by git
is cool until your marketing team constantly bothers your dev team to
change a typo.
sublinear wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
And their websites are total dog shit and probably a legal
nightmare waiting to happen because of it.
sublinear wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
There is no way around needing a developer (and a lot of testing)
to "just fix a typo".
First the typo is discovered and it changes the length of the text.
If it's more than a few words this becomes a layout problem. You
will have to nudge things around a bit, but now this also fails
accessibility testing because the alt text or aria labels were
overlooked or font size or line height were changed. Then the
marketing team reviews it and change their minds yet again and
people are stuck in a hellish loop of tiny updates that start
breaking other things through runaway inconsistency. Of course it's
worth noting that the typos almost always originate from that same
marketing team.
This is the nature of coding websites by committee. A CMS just
makes this worse by getting in the way of proper versioning, and as
a bonus launders all the blame onto developers.
It's far from naive to just use git and set up a CI pipeline to
copy your static build onto a web server. This is done all the time
by anyone with common sense and familiarity with web dev. It "just
works" so well that it remains under the radar to anyone new to
this and looking for solutions. The CMS grift continues as their
sales team insists their product is the best solution.
omnimus wrote 2 min ago:
I see you had a bad experience with CMSs but in reality vast
majority of content websites use CMS and are for entities that
have 0 developers. There is simply no way for them to use some
homebaked static site generator script that you personally see as
easier solution.
And those sites can be pretty great. The pace of dev is just
different. Usually with big initial investment and then some bulk
fixup in few months or a year.
I am actually not sure why to hate CMSs good modern ones are
basically sweet web framework with highly customisible admin
panel.
bonesss wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Imagine if that dev team could create some kind of hyper
intelligent interface to git so powerful even a marketer could use
itâ¦
Like a couple icons and some basic platform scripts for the 99% use
cases of picking a branch, adding content, and occasionally saying
âoopsâ?
Powered by Git doesnât have to mean using Git raw.
sublinear wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
Or just hire people for your marketing team that have even a
passing familiarity with web dev? They're not even that hard to
find.
Keep those initial hires aboard and train up the rest. Get rid of
the ones who don't want to learn. I mean really why do we try so
hard to avoid bridging such simple knowledge gaps? It's not a big
deal and we shouldn't shut people out of career development under
all these obviously false excuses.
GlitchInstitute wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
you literally need 1 guy who will check marketing's AI Cursor
commits of the changed typo. way cheaper than paying for the CMS.
odie5533 wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
I think there is a need for Agent-first tooling for things like CMS.
> 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.
camillomiller wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
This is a great testament to why 75% of the web runs on WordPress.
Most of the problem mentioned have been solved by wordpress for ages,
but thereâs an entire industry set on reinventing the wheel in ways
that really baffle me.
If your actual goal is to publish on the web in a sane and
understandable way, wordpress solves the problem for the largest number
of cases.
Scalability is solved. Usability by non tech editors is solved. Draft
and approval flow is solved. Caching and speed is solved. You want
headless? Oh, turns out wordpress is actually GREAT for that too.
Itâs not sexy I guess? But if the goal is âwork doneâ instead of
âtech wank to impress investors with complexityâ, thatâs a
solution that works very well.
pjmlp wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
Wordpress is nice, but not on the same league as Sitecore, AEM,
Optimizely, Dynamics, and many other enterprise class CMS.
I guess those belong to the remaining 25%.
beezlewax wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
WordPress didn't solve anything. They just got the first.
Macha wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Nah, the likes of Drupal and others were established before
Wordpress was launched, even longer if you consider Wordpress 1 & 2
were âblog software for blogsâ more than the behemoth modern
versions have become.
I think being later actually worked in their favor as they caught
the wave that Drupal and others were too early for. They were
simpler when a lot of new developers and clients were around and
grew in complexity as what people did on the web did, while Drupal
and co just seemed bloated, even though arguably modern versions of
Wordpress with the plugin setups that are common now are even more
complicated than those old version of their competitors at the
start
eloisant wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
They got there first, then as a result, they have:
- a big ecosystem of themes and plugins (especially for SEO)
- an army of contractors who can set it up for cheap, and don't
know anything else
- users who know their way through the UI and don't even think
about looking at alternatives
yurishimo wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
It also heavily depends on _what type of content_ your CMS is
serving. Blog posts and static pages? Okay, sure, probably fine to
bolt WP on top and be done with it.
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.
larusso wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
This story reminds me of a similar issue people love to solve with the
same idea. Software builds. The canât we have a simple make file or
worse just a shell script to build.
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
ainât so simple anymore.
kstenerud wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
The idea is to have an 80/20 build system:
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.
larusso wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Yes. In the example of gradle I setup all specifics to the well
know lifecycle tasks: check, assemble and in some cases publish.
Some projects are more complicated specifically when you can really
use the rule of: 1 project one assembly. See android with apk vs
bundle.
Here you may need more specific tasks. But I try to bind CI (be it
Jenkins or GitHub actions) to only know the basic interface.
But I meant specifically the believe that build systems and tooling
around is too complicated and unnecessary.
kstenerud wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
Ah yes. Unfortunately the complexity is necessary in modern
codebases. There are usually ways to simplify, but only to a
point - after that all you're doing is smearing the complexity
around rather than containing it.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Having Make shell out to the real build system is a nice
compromise. Then you can stick your tests and stuff in there too
BoredPositron wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
The font rendering is all kinds of fucked with Firefox impossible to
read.
poppafuze wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Same in Brave. This is a recurring problem with various sites that I
have not been able to get to the bottom of. Best described as a
"bouncy vertical kerning problem" but I'm making that term up.
kmelve wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
Ooof. We should fix that!
adamscybot wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
The point about CMSs having value in possibly being a more real-time
collaborative UI layer to interact with that's less-scary for the
average Joe is a valid driver; and is a critical factor for many use
cases. But the the other stuff is clearly reasoning with a solution
already in mind...
"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., [1] )
and doesn't require moving away from Markdown files in GIT if you want.
Or use something like content collection in astro ( [2] ). 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...
(HTM) [1]: https://markdowndb.com/
(HTM) [2]: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/
mahmedtan wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
If anyone from sanity is reading this. Please for the love of god fix
the rich text editor. Itâs a great CMS for everything but writing
text.
kmelve wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
We're fixing every week! Have you tried it recently? Are there
particular issues you're having?
RobotToaster wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
This is written by a proprietary CMS company, so they may be slightly
bias.
mmcnl wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
The original article was written by an employee of an AI company,
demonstrating that a CMS is not really needed when you can use AI.
Both are probably biased, but nonetheless both articles are worth a
read. Re-evaluating established patterns in the age of AI is an
interesting thought exploration, from both sides.
kmelve wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
Author here! Of course, I'm biased!
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.
d--b wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
I have built several small websites in the past that were updated by
non tech people.
I have tried, believe me, to make CMS work. I really did. But every
time the customer came back with âcan I do this or thatâ 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 didnât 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.
rsolva wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
I built something similar recently [0] with help from Claude Code (in
Zed). It is still only a rough prototype, but I have tried it out on
non-techy people for a project, and it has worked better than
anything I have tried prior (Wordpress, Hugo etc).
I mount the folder with the content so they always has easy access to
add and modify the website directly from the file explorer. It is
quite powerful because there is not friction. You hit save, and it is
live. This can off course be a drawback too, it is quicker to mess up
stuff, but that is a trade off I am willing to make in 95% of the use
cases I deal with.
[0]
(HTM) [1]: https://forge.dmz.skyfritt.net/ruben/folderweb
mabedan wrote 12 hours 1 min ago:
> something where the structure of the site matched a folder
structure
Kirby?
d--b wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
That was my first try, but many things were missing from Kirby for
what the customer wanted.
omnimus wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
I am curious what was possible with yaml+md files that was
impossible with flat file CMS. Afaik flat file CMSes are
basically glorified .md editors.
d--b wrote 59 min ago:
The markdown didnât help with anything that CMS couldnât
do.
But special sections of pages would render differently based on
the yaml configs.
You may think of it as: for each page, the yaml contained the
React props to render. I d write the the main components, and
the user would inject content through yaml as they saw fit.
faeyanpiraat wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
How did you manage training non-tech people to edit yaml and markdown
files?
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?
d--b wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
I got them to install MacDown, which is a standalone Markdown
editor with side by side editing (text on the left, render on the
right), and print a cheat sheet for links and images. Markdown is
very easy to write. Nowadays there's probably an opensource wysiwyg
editor.
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.
samdoesnothing wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
I'm really getting tired of gen AI and this article is like a perfect
microcosm. Partially or at least fully AI generated, discussing a
vibe-coded CMS built by an AI startup. It's several layers of marketing
and no serious engineering.
Where are the grownups in the room?
lmc wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
It didn't read as LLM-generated to me. And having some experience
with CMS development, the article has plenty of substance. You can
check previous blog articles from the same author far predating LLMs
- here's one from 2018: [1] . The main difference i see with the OP
article is it's a bit more emotive - probably a result of responding
to a public trashing of their product.
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!".
(HTM) [1]: https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-...
samdoesnothing wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
Comparing the two articles, they have a completely different style.
I wasn't totally convinced the linked article was AI generated but
I am now. Clearly the author can write, so I'm a bit saddened that
they used an LLM for this article
PunchyHamster wrote 12 hours 54 min ago:
As I read it I was just thinking "whoa, someone really just decided
to pawn their site design off to AI, then complain it doesn't get
CMS, then build CMS purely so they can yell their requests at the AI,
and so the company making the CMS pawned off to AI writing article
why using AI isn't a great way to click at their CMS"
could be summed up as "and not a single bit of productivity was had
that day"
samdoesnothing wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
It's like a reflection of Nvidia, Oracle and, OpenAI selling each
other products and just trading the same money back and forth.
Which is of course a reflection of the classic economist joke about
eating poo in the forest. "GDP is up though!"
Meanwhile nothing actually changed and the result is pretty much
the same anyways.
CSSer wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
If only we could take output and reverse-engineer activation layers
through some parameters and get the original prompt. Imagine how much
time we could save if we could read the chat transcript or the two
actually human-written paragraphs this article was based on. They'd
be some banal rant about a DevRel dude but at least it'd be more
efficient.
samdoesnothing wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
Would be nice but you could probably edit it enough or splice
different chat outputs together to break it.
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.
Tenemo wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
It does read very LLM-y to me, too. The short sentences, dramatic
pauses â but maybe I'm oversensitive nowadays, it's really hard to
tell at times.
samdoesnothing wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
There are some obvious tells like the headings ("Markdown is nice
for LLMs. Thatâs not the point", "What Lee actually built
(spoiler: a CMS)"), the dramatic full stops ("\nThis works until it
doesn't.\n"), etc. It's difficult to describe because it's sort of
a gut feeling you have pattern matching what you get from your own
LLM usage.
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...
munch117 wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
This article is just about as un-AI written as anything I've ever
read. The headings are clearly just the outline that he started
with. An outline with a clear concept for the story that he's
trying to tell.
I'm beginning to wonder how many of the "This was written by AI!"
comments are AI-generated.
kmelve wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
It's strange to see folks here speculate about something you've
written.
And if you only knew how much those headings and the structure
of this post changed as I wrote it out and got internal
feedback on it ^^_
kmelve wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
Author here.
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.
samdoesnothing wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for sure
because I can see it's style rubbing off.
Someone linked this article you wrote from 7 years ago. [1]
It's well written and obviously human made. Curious what you
think as to the differences.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity...
inesranzo wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Why do you need to use Git as a CMS?
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.
ozim wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
I do believe that using Git GUI for those people should be perfectly
fine and it would be good for business people in general to adopt Git
for a lot of documents or content.
But forcing people to use the tool is not the way to go as ROI
depends a lot on context of the company and lots of time just a CMS
would be better bang for the buck.
gregates wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
It seems like the argument is roughly: we used to use CMS because we
had comms & marketing people who don't know git. But we plan to
replace them all with ChatGPT or Claude, which does. So now we don't
need CMS.
(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".)
eloisant wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
I don't think that's the argument. The argument is that comms and
marketing people don't know git, but now that they can use AI they
will be able to use tools they couldn't use before.
Basically, if they ask for a change, can preview it, ask for follow
ups if it's not what they wanted, then validate it when it's good,
then they don't need a GUI.
arionmiles wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
Cursor replaced their CMS because Cursor is a 50-people team
shipping content to one website. Cursor also has a "Designers are
Developers" scenario so their entire team is well versed with git.
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 wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
> Lee's argument for moving to code is that agents can work with
code.
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 wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
There's no sense in answering your questions when you actively
refuse to read the article. You're more susceptible to
misunderstand the arguments given your apparent bias on
AI-motivated downsizing, which I must reiterate is not covered
in the article at all.
gregates wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
Alright you badgered me into reading the original and the
linked post does not misinterpret it.
> 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.
antonvs wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
> This is an AI company saying "if you buy our product you
don't need a CMS"
No, it isn't. The AI company was explicit about their use
case not being a general one:
> "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.
Itâs been like this since the dawn of time (WordPress)."
> Alright you badgered me into reading the original
It's not "badgering" you to point out that your comments
are pointless if they're just going to speculate about
something you haven't read. But if you feel "badgered", you
could just not comment next time, that way no-one will
"badger" you.
d--b wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
Ah, this is fun.
The article is about how people shouldnât build CMSs because
theyâre 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 âproper version
controlâ. 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 notâ¦
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 âCMSâ used by millions of
people. It works fine.
PunchyHamster wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
Git can make sense, but you still need to wrap it for non-technical
people. No matter how easy markup is, some people still will refuse
to learn it and ask for WYSIWYG tools
sublinear wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical person
is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are a subset
of the people now near or at retirement age.
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.
collingreen wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
I've been shocked when talking to younger people who have -never
used a computer that wasn't their phone-. People genuinely
interested in cs degrees that needed to be taught how to use the
computer first. These are not "dumb" or "unwilling" folks they
just have grown up in a way I don't recognize and didn't expect.
I assume it's the equivalent of how I've gone to a library to do
research at most a half dozen times in my life despite doing lots
and lots of reading, learning, and writing - my world just does
not look like "do that at the library" anymore even though
probably folks just 10 years older were almost exclusively there.
I think you're painting with too broad of a brush if your goal is
an accurate model of the world here.
antonvs wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
> I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical
person is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are
a subset of the people now near or at retirement age.
This is a parochial viewpoint that only describes the bubble
you're living in.
weitendorf wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
A huge number of those people only interact with computers as a
consumer. Beyond that, maybe schools assignments, texting and
other social media, light email, and video games (eg through
steam or a console). There is a big gap between that and someone
comfortable using git.
Donât 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 theyâre
going to be bad at it for a while (true for both git and phone
calls) and they donât know how long itâs going to take, or
the extent of what they donât 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 itâs 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 itâs worth it to learn what
a rebase does.
sublinear wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
> think about how many developers would do anything it takes to
avoid calling someone on the phone
Think about all the developers we force into that situation all
the time anyway.
> they know how to automate and build stuff
To an extent, yes, but as the author said "content management"
is a complex problem.
> wondering whether itâs worth it to learn what a rebase does
This is the crux of the problem. Versioning is fundamental to
project management for the kind of project you'd use a CMS for,
yet with a CMS everyone is too siloed and the oversimplified
interface ruins any chance of doing better. Any CMS is a dead
end that leads to chronically incorrect assets, incomplete
patches, broken links, etc. This is also generally true for
many other low/no-code solutions.
I'm not saying the "non-technical" people need to work directly
in git, but they do need to be familiar with this kind of
workflow when discussing with developers, and developers are
absolutely still needed. Any CMS workflow is too restrictive.
Nobody experienced and sane would prefer it over a git based
solution unless they're being bullied into using a CMS. It's
been like this forever and no CMS has ever been able to
overcome this reputation.
At some point one needs to ask why a CMS is preferred and time
and time again the answer is only cost cutting. In any other
business decision that reason wouldn't be good enough. CMS
products only exist because of neglect, ignorance, and
cheapness.
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