The CMS is dead, long live the CMS

The claim

It has been reported that a self‑described 20‑year WordPress agency veteran announced on LinkedIn that they’re abandoning WordPress and moving the whole shop “onto AI,” allegedly rebuilding the agency’s site in a fraction of the time with tools like Claude Code. The post — one of many similar notes surfacing lately — leans on a simple pitch: tell an AI to make the change and you never have to log into an admin panel again. Bold. Tempting. Also, a little too neat?

The context

Longtime WordPress figure Joost de Valk has been part of this conversation, writing about migrating his personal blog from WordPress to Astro and later to EmDash, and arguing that not every site needs a CMS. That’s true and hardly new: simple landing pages and personal blogs have been run without full CMS stacks for years. But his move also comes with nuance — Joost says WordPress remains his tool for more complex projects — a reminder that tradeoffs matter.

The caveat

The author of the post rebuilt jazzsequence.com as a headless Next.js site and likes the result, but raises a sharper point: have we learned nothing from the JavaScript churn of the last decade? Dependency hell, rapidly changing frameworks and fragile subdependencies don’t vanish because AI generated the initial migration. It has been reported that AI can automate parts of the process, but automating scaffolding doesn’t solve long‑term maintenance, security patching, or architectural debt. Is handing an interpreter the keys to your website really the future, or just a different kind of technical babysitting?

The takeaway

This isn’t a funeral for the CMS so much as a rearguard action. For simple, static sites, AI and modern frameworks can be handy; for complex, living systems a CMS — with its roles, permissions, plugins and battle‑tested workflows — still carries value. Expect more experiments, more Twitter and LinkedIn proclamations, and the same uncomfortable lesson: tooling changes, but the hard problems rarely go away.

Sources: jazzsequence.com, Hacker News