The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS!
AI is changing the rules in every industry. The CMS is no exception, especially as it is at the intersection between developers and marketers, which are two of the most disrupted roles (code generation and content generation).
@leerob (VP of DevRel at
@cursor_ai, ex-
@vercel) published a great piece of content about their migration from a proprietary, restricted, Headless CMS to a fully Markdown file-based workflow.
And he is right (on some aspects): agents are excellent at editing both code and (content) files at the same time, as they can easily get both in context, especially in a great AI code editor like Cursor.
Markdown files are great for small projects. We’ve seen a lot of “git-based” CMS emerging over the past years. However, none of them has been successful for large-scale projects:
Requires a deployment every time there is an update
Data inconsistency
Unable to have relations between content types
Too technical for non-devs
But what we are talking about is worse than that. It is a no-CMS approach.
We’ve been there, done that: The first version of our own website was all about hard-coded content in a good old EJS template (yes, that was before React!) and a big JSON file containing all of the (5 or so) blog posts. We were 3 developers, editing files was easier and faster than setting up a CMS.
The Cursor team is very specific, as they are a team of engineers (which makes total sense for a code editor company).
It is great, until it is not. CMSs have been invented because non-technical people need to edit their websites without needing to reach developers.
CMSs bring the structure and features any serious project needs:
- Relations management
- Content internationalization
- Content scheduling (aka releases)
- Content history
- API tokens
- Webhooks
- Integrations
- Authentication
- Custom fields
- Media library
- Role management
- Review workflows
- Security (Single Sign-On, Audit Logs, etc.)
With all of this being said, I think the most important insight Lee shared in this post is the agentic approach to building content: everybody deserves to ask for website updates in plain English, and agents must be able to do this autonomously.
That means:
- CMSs must be agentic
- Agents must easily communicate with each other, or everything must sit under one single tool: frontend code, CMS, hosting, and more
This is exactly why:
- We launched Strapi AI
- We are about to release Strapi MCP
- TEAAAASING: Over the last eight months, we have developed a brand-new product that addresses all the issues mentioned above. Comment “FOMO” to get early access, and I will send you the link
Stay tuned!