You Should Never Build a CMS, a response to Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets

“Man who owns company says you need their product and not the other guys product.”

Joking aside, the sanity blog post is pretty good. As is Lee Robs. And as a sales pitch of the Cursor product, Lee did a great job of migrating their site off Sanity. In true vibe coding fashion the green field project was pretty good. Let’s check in in 6 months and see how things are holding up. Considering that what Lee Rob at Cursor did when he “migrated cursor.com from a CMS to raw code and Markdown”, is he built a fucking CMS. Just one without any of the features that will inevevitably be requested of him as the site grows and he left behind at Sanity.

Sanity makes some good arguments for a CMS instead of a single file = single page model. Content publishing is usually not as simple as creating a new markdown file in your git repository. There may be approval workflows, legal and compliance considerations, internationalization and localization work. Actually managing your content in a way that is not relying entirely on grep such that you can find all references to a specific product, or are dealing with esoteric content siloing rules dictated by a search performance team.

Neither are bullet proof solutions to building a website. Depending on your scale, your goals, your audience, and so many other factors, you may ONLY need a flat file static site that is managed by your team of coders, or you may need a structured content storage to emit and generate web pages and content across a variety of devices and screens.