Why do you need to use Git as a CMS?

That seems backwards and hellish when you want to grow your content and marketing team as they have no clue on how to use this arcane tool.

Now the engineers would need to be bothered by the marketing department time and time again to add blog posts, wasting engineering time.

This is the reason why CMS's like Sanity, Wordpress, Directus exist.

using Git as a CMS doesn't make sense at scale.

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gregates 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like the argument is roughly: we used to use CMS because we had comms & marketing people who don't know git. But we plan to replace them all with ChatGPT or Claude, which does. So now we don't need CMS.

(I didn't click through to the original post because it seems like another boring "will AI replace humans?" debate, but that's the sense I got from the repeated mention of "agents".)

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arionmiles 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cursor replaced their CMS because Cursor is a 50-people team shipping content to one website. Cursor also has a "Designers are Developers" scenario so their entire team is well versed with git.

This setup is minimal and works for them for the moment, but the author argues (and reasonably well enough, IMO) that this won't scale when they have dedicated marketing and comms teams.

It's not at all about Cursor using the chance to replace a department with AI, the department doesn't exist in their case.

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gregates 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> Lee's argument for moving to code is that agents can work with code.

So do you think this is a misrepresentation of Lee's argument? Again, I couldn't be bothered to read the original, so I'm relying on this interpretation of the original.

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arionmiles 14 hours ago | parent [-]

There's no sense in answering your questions when you actively refuse to read the article. You're more susceptible to misunderstand the arguments given your apparent bias on AI-motivated downsizing, which I must reiterate is not covered in the article at all.

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gregates 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Alright you badgered me into reading the original and the linked post does not misinterpret it.

> Previously, we could @cursor and ask it to modify the code and content, but now we introduced a new CMS abstraction in between. Everything became a bit more clunky. We went back to clicking through UI menus versus asking agents to do things for us.

> With AI and coding agents, the cost of an abstraction has never been higher. I asked them: do we really need a CMS? Will people care if they have to use a chatbot to modify content versus a GUI?

> For many teams, the cost of the CMS abstraction is worth it. They need to have a portal where writers or marketers can log in, click a few buttons, and change the content.

> More importantly, the migration has already been worth it. The first day after, I merged a fix to the website from a cloud agent on my phone.

> The cost of abstractions with AI is very high.

The whole argument is about how it's easier to use agents to modify the website without a CMS in the way.

This is an AI company saying "if you buy our product you don't need a CMS" and a CMS company saying "nuh-uh, you still need a CMS".

The most interesting thing here is that the CMS company feels the need to respond to the AI company's argument publicly.

	▲	antonvs 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This is an AI company saying "if you buy our product you don't need a CMS" No, it isn't. The AI company was explicit about their use case not being a general one: > "For many teams, the cost of the CMS abstraction is worth it. They need to have a portal where writers or marketers can log in, click a few buttons, and change the content. It’s been like this since the dawn of time (WordPress)." > Alright you badgered me into reading the original It's not "badgering" you to point out that your comments are pointless if they're just going to speculate about something you haven't read. But if you feel "badgered", you could just not comment next time, that way no-one will "badger" you.

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eloisant 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think that's the argument. The argument is that comms and marketing people don't know git, but now that they can use AI they will be able to use tools they couldn't use before.

Basically, if they ask for a change, can preview it, ask for follow ups if it's not what they wanted, then validate it when it's good, then they don't need a GUI.

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PunchyHamster 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Git can make sense, but you still need to wrap it for non-technical people. No matter how easy markup is, some people still will refuse to learn it and ask for WYSIWYG tools

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sublinear 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical person is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are a subset of the people now near or at retirement age.

It's almost 2026. There are more people who know how to code than ever before. This stuff is taught in every school now. Everyone has access to AI to help them if they get stuck. If someone under 50 is unwilling to work I am unwilling to employ.

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weitendorf 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A huge number of those people only interact with computers as a consumer. Beyond that, maybe schools assignments, texting and other social media, light email, and video games (eg through steam or a console). There is a big gap between that and someone comfortable using git.

Don’t be an asshole to them about that, think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone. Obviously they can learn it, but they know they’re going to be bad at it for a while (true for both git and phone calls) and they don’t know how long it’s going to take, or the extent of what they don’t know.

The thing about software companies is that they know how to automate and build stuff so why invest the time in learning a CMS if it’s something they could quickly solve for their own use case? Well, the same applies to people who just want to point and click and write, wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does.

	▲	sublinear 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> think about how many developers would do anything it takes to avoid calling someone on the phone Think about all the developers we force into that situation all the time anyway. > they know how to automate and build stuff To an extent, yes, but as the author said "content management" is a complex problem. > wondering whether it’s worth it to learn what a rebase does This is the crux of the problem. Versioning is fundamental to project management for the kind of project you'd use a CMS for, yet with a CMS everyone is too siloed and the oversimplified interface ruins any chance of doing better. Any CMS is a dead end that leads to chronically incorrect assets, incomplete patches, broken links, etc. This is also generally true for many other low/no-code solutions. I'm not saying the "non-technical" people need to work directly in git, but they do need to be familiar with this kind of workflow when discussing with developers, and developers are absolutely still needed. Any CMS workflow is too restrictive. Nobody experienced and sane would prefer it over a git based solution unless they're being bullied into using a CMS. It's been like this forever and no CMS has ever been able to overcome this reputation. At some point one needs to ask why a CMS is preferred and time and time again the answer is only cost cutting. In any other business decision that reason wouldn't be good enough. CMS products only exist because of neglect, ignorance, and cheapness.

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collingreen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been shocked when talking to younger people who have -never used a computer that wasn't their phone-. People genuinely interested in cs degrees that needed to be taught how to use the computer first. These are not "dumb" or "unwilling" folks they just have grown up in a way I don't recognize and didn't expect. I assume it's the equivalent of how I've gone to a library to do research at most a half dozen times in my life despite doing lots and lots of reading, learning, and writing - my world just does not look like "do that at the library" anymore even though probably folks just 10 years older were almost exclusively there.

I think you're painting with too broad of a brush if your goal is an accurate model of the world here.

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antonvs 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I'm gonna be honest here. I don't know what a non-technical person is anymore. The only people I can truly label that way are a subset of the people now near or at retirement age.

This is a parochial viewpoint that only describes the bubble you're living in.

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ozim 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do believe that using Git GUI for those people should be perfectly fine and it would be good for business people in general to adopt Git for a lot of documents or content.

But forcing people to use the tool is not the way to go as ROI depends a lot on context of the company and lots of time just a CMS would be better bang for the buck.

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d--b 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah, this is fun.

The article is about how people shouldn’t build CMSs because they’re building things that are too simple, missing tons features and not realizing the scope of what they get into.

But one thing that CMSs may want to have is “proper version control”. So what do they do? They are faced with 2 options: using a complete version control system like git, which allows them to do branches and merges and PR reviews and so on. Or they build something simpler internally, with only draft/publish, like they usually do.

But what if 2 marketers are making changes to the same file at the same time? one because the name of a product changed, and one because there is a new christmas sale. Does the version system handle merging? Maybe… maybe not…

The point I am making is that we always make the tradeoffs of buying off-the-shelf complex stuff vs internally built, incomplete buggy but tailor-made solutions.

And CMS is very much a space where customability matters.

BTW, Github Pages is a git-backed “CMS” used by millions of people. It works fine.