You should never build a CMS

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:37:00 -0400

Knut Melvær, Sanity.io, Dec 18, 2025

This is a fascinating discussion for anyone who creates or uses content management systems. Here's the setup: Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com (a website supporting the Cursor AI engine) from Sanity (a content management system) to an AI-authored melange of cloud services including GitHub, documenting the whole process. "What I previously thought would take weeks and maybe an agency to help with the slog work was done in $260 of tokens (or one $200/mo Cursor plan)," wrote Robinson. This article was written by Knut Melvær, an executive at Sanity, who observes, "when a high-profile customer moves off your product and the story resonates with builders you respect, you pay attention." And while he agrees with a lot of what Robinson, the gist of this response is that while a non-CMS solution might work in the short term, you will eventually run into the sort of problem a CMS was intended to solve. "Markdown files are the content equivalent of denormalized strings everywhere. It works for small datasets. It becomes a maintenance nightmare at scale."