The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS

I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from a self-proclaimed 20 year agency veteran of WordPress saying that was it, they’re moving the entire agency off of WordPress and onto AI. Now, because I, too, am a 20 year veteran of WordPress, this kind of story catches my attention. He posted that they just rebuilt his agency’s site in a fraction of the time and he was never again going to use WordPress. It doesn’t matter who this person was because, honestly, this is a story that’s been cropping up a lot lately. The idea was that they can use Claude Code or other AI tools to build sites to spec faster than they ever could with WordPress, so they’re pivoting their entire businesses to this model.

In the midst of this, longtime WordPress icon Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later). And it seems like for some folks, that idea means that you should shift your entire WordPress business, your personal WordPress sites, to some AI-generated thing where it’ll be so much easier because rather than having to log into an admin panel to change your store hours, you can just use an AI tool like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT (which you’re obviously already using daily) and tell the AI to make the change for you. Your interface into managing your site is through an AI interpreter. This is the future we wanted, right?

Joost isn’t wrong. Not every site does need a CMS. But that idea is old enough to drink. Ever since CMSes came into existence, we’ve been saying “not every site needs a CMS,” so putting a coat of paint on an old adage and proclaiming that AI is the answer from on high with a pair of stone tablets is not unique. It’s riding on the coattails of the AI hype train. A landing page, a simple portfolio, a personal blog — these never needed a CMS with a database, a PHP runtime and a plugin ecosystem. I will still personally argue that a CMS makes them easier to manage, but they never needed a CMS.

And Joost is careful to point out that just because his blog is running on Astro doesn’t mean he’s abandoning WordPress. WordPress is still his tool of choice for more complex projects. And he’s been around long enough to know what the tradeoffs are. For a long while, just having a CMS was maybe a bit of potentially expensive icing on the cake of having a website. And maybe if there’s a faster way to edit content, via Google Docs (e.g. Pantheon Content Publisher) or Markdown, you never actually need a CMS backend.

Fine.

But the idea that AI can migrate your entire site away from your current stack seems incredibly shortsighted.

I’ve spent the last month building next.jazzsequence.com — a Next.js-based reimplementation of jazzsequence.com that’s entirely headless without any loss of functionality. I think it’s great and I genuinely hope that you are reading this post on that site. but the thing that occurs to me, as someone who’s been doing this for 20 years is…

Have we actually learned nothing?

Because sure, AI can spit out a new, modern site and migrate everything out of WP or Drupal. But…to what? A new JavaScript-based site using the latest framework du jour?

Have we forgotten how quickly the JavaScript landscape changes? How many frameworks have risen and fallen in the last 10 years?

Have we forgotten dependency hell? When you want to keep your packages up to date, but Package A depends on Package B and Package B can’t be updated because Package C is a subdependency that didn’t get updated recently and now you’ve got a security vulnerability in your stack that’s unresolvable because of conflicting package dependencies.

Just because AI can (maybe) manage that stuff and Dependabot is a thing that exists doesn’t make those problems go away. It just hides them under a layer of sycophantic chatbot-induced security. Do you really think users are going to want to manage NPM dependencies? Even the people celebrating AI-powered dependency management are proving the point: one blog found 22 outdated packages including major breaking changes on an Astro blog that was left alone for a year.

The first video I recorded for the Pantheon YouTube channel after becoming a Developer Advocate asked the question “is more Gutenberg really the future we want?” Now I have a new question: is working in an AI tool really the editing solution that we’re looking for? One that’s superior to the admin panel of WordPress or Drupal?

For all of the WordPress admin dashboard’s apparent flaws, it does succeed in giving publishing and editing power to people who don’t want to learn code (or Markdown, or Git) in a way that the Drupal ecosystem is trying to adapt to now with a more simplified admin user experience and curated recipes and templates. If the core premise is “your IDE will be Claude Desktop,” I have to ask, is that really what we want? When a non-technical person changes their store hours in a WordPress site, they can hit Save and look at the site and see that something happened. When you’re sending your command through a chatbot, you’re fundamentally trusting the chatbot to perform the action you requested, in the way that you requested it, correctly and accurately. That’s actually handing the keys to the castle to your robot butler and hoping nothing weird happens. If we’ve learned anything since the initial release of ChatGPT, LLMs are great at making weird shit happen. And you still need to verify the AI did the thing you asked. You just successfully moved the complexity to a different part of the stack.

WordPress is not absent in the AI-powered future, either. You don’t need to throw away your CMS if you do want an AI to change your store hours. MCP server support in WordPress core exists (I should know, I implemented it on this site). There will be more and more of this built into core in the coming releases, making it easier, not harder, to connect your AI brain to your WordPress site if you so desire.

So, what’s really underneath the pitch to migrate your site away from WordPress to an AI-generated, modern, JavaScript-infused site? Could it be that these vendors that are jumping on the “I’ll migrate your site away from WordPress/Drupal for you” bandwagon are really just creating demand for their own businesses, riding the hype train of AI and taking a lowest common denominator solution, misrepresenting the trends and actual conversation, vilifying the actual projects that are helping people and locking themselves in as a vendor of choice because they’re the only ones who know how to maintain your AI-generated site now?

That’s just vendor lock-in in a trenchcoat. If you hire someone to migrate your WordPress site to an AI-generated site on the cheap and you need to change or update something? In WordPress you just log in, or hire any of a thousand developers to do the thing for you. Your bespoke, artisanal AI-generated Astro/Next/Whatever.js site? You’re calling the agency that built it. Builder.ai collapsed and clients lost access to everything. That’s the extreme end of the spectrum of when your site depends on a specific vendor’s knowledge and tooling.

I’ve spent a month with Claude Code, slowly reimagining this site. In fact, I hope you’re reading this on the reimagined version of this site. But the conclusion I came to wasn’t “I need to get rid of the CMS parts” it was “abso-fuggin-lutely KEEP the CMS.”

I started blogging when it was still called a web log. It was hand-coded HTML FTP’d to a server in San Francisco. Eventually this site evolved into using a blogging platform called sBlog, and that eventually migrated into WordPress. I kept every post — even the hand-coded HTML ones — and migrated every one. There is, no shit, 24 years worth of content on this site. I’m sure it’s not di