"You should never build a CMS"

Summary

We're just going to call it: up until recently, cursor.com was powered by Sanity as its CMS.Then Lee Robinson sat down and spent 344 agent requests and around $260 to migrate the content and setup to markdown files, GitHub, Vercel, and a vibe-coded media management interface.He did a great write-up of the process on his blog. He was classy and didn't name us.Of course, when a high-profile customer moves off your product and the story resonates with builders you respect, you pay attention.The weird twist here is that we sort of agree with Lee’s take. He has a lot of great points. The conversation around complexity and abstractions that a headless CMS brings reflects real frustration. The way things have been done for the past decade deserved criticism.But Lee's post doesn't tell the full story. We see what people are trying to solve when it comes to content every day. We live and breathe this CMS stuff. So let us add some context.The headless CMS industry built complexity that didn't deliver proportional value for many. This is true.Preview workflows are clunky. Draft modes, toolbar toggles, account requirements just to see what your content looks like before it goes live. Having to add data attributes everywhere to connect front ends with backend fields feels unnecessary. Real friction for something that feels it should be simple.Auth fragmentation is annoying. CMS login. GitHub login. Hosting provider login. Three systems to get a preview working.Their CDN costs was largely caused by hosting a video from our file storage. It’s not an ideal way to host videos in front of Cursor’s massive audience. We should have made it more obvious that there are better and cheaper ways, like using the Mux plugin.332K lines of code was removed in exchange for 43K new ones. That sounds a great win. We love getting rid of code too. And here's the one that actually matters: AI agents couldn't easily reach content behind authenticated APIs. When your coding agent can grep your codebase...