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“You should never build a CMS” (sanity.io)
This story reminds me of a similar issue people love to solve with the same idea. Software builds. The can’t 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 ain’t so simple anymore.
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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". Wastes a ton of time.
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Having Make shell out to the real build system is a nice compromise. Then you can stick your tests and stuff in there too
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 “can I do this or that” 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 didn’t 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.
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> something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure Kirby?
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?
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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: https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-headless-cms . 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!".
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"
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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.
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".)
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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.
Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation (hcn.org)
Not surprised. The imagery and the aggression involved in the music can make it seem daunting and somehow damaging, but the metal community is surprisingly chill and friendly, and, sometimes, just so damned silly. E.g. here's Slipknot's singer live in concert singing the SpongeBob Squarepants theme song, because the audience really wanted him to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OLtoY70AI Or, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Devin Townsend signing this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1isK2MYWI is not the same Devin singing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsd4ZkFVOHY
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First he went to Rome to see the pope, now SpongeBob. I’m beginning to like him.
A moshpit is the only consensual form of non-sexual violence outside of sports.
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I dunno. There is always this one, little overweight, sweaty guy without a shirt. Makes it a little bit sexual, doesn’t it?
> And where’s Sitting Bull Gentle correction: you meant Crowfoot, or maybe John Two Guns White Calf? Because Sitting Bull, was a Lakota chief.
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Excuse my ignorance, I was sincerely trying to understand the background, and had little knowledge about the different chiefs. I wanted to point to the fact “remember your roots”. Thanks!
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