GoKawiilThis entry is part 22 of 22 in the series Artificial Intelligence
I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from a self-proclaimed 20 year agency veteran of WordPress saying that was it, they’re moving the entire agency off of WordPress and onto AI. Now, because I, too, am a 20 year veteran of WordPress, this kind of story catches my attention. He posted that they just rebuilt his agency’s site in a fraction of the time and he was never again going to use WordPress. It doesn’t matter who this person was because, honestly, this is a story that’s been cropping up a lot lately. The idea was that they can use Claude Code or other AI tools to build sites to spec faster than they ever could with WordPress, so they’re pivoting their entire businesses to this model.
In the midst of this, longtime WordPress icon Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later). And it seems like for some folks, that idea means that you should shift your entire WordPress business, your personal WordPress sites, to some AI-generated thing where it’ll be so much easier because rather than having to log into an admin panel to change your store hours, you can just use an AI tool like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT (which you’re obviously already using daily) and tell the AI to make the change for you. Your interface into managing your site is through an AI interpreter. This is the future we wanted, right?
Joost isn’t wrong. Not every site does need a CMS. But that idea is old enough to drink. Ever since CMSes came into existence, we’ve been saying “not every site needs a CMS,” so putting a coat of paint on an old adage and proclaiming that AI is the answer from on high with a pair of stone tablets is not unique. It’s riding on the coattails of the AI hype train. A landing page, a simple portfolio, a personal blog — these never needed a CMS with a database, a PHP runtime and a plugin ecosystem. I will still personally argue that a CMS makes them easier to manage, but they never needed a CMS.
And Joost is careful to point out that just because his blog is running on Astro doesn’t mean he’s abandoning WordPress. WordPress is still his tool of choice for more complex projects. And he’s been around long enough to know what the tradeoffs are. For a long while, just having a CMS was maybe a bit of potentially expensive icing on the cake of having a website. And maybe if there’s a faster way to edit content, via Google Docs (e.g. Pantheon Content Publisher) or Markdown, you never actually need a CMS backend.
Fine.
But the idea that AI can migrate your entire site away from your current stack seems incredibly shortsighted.
I’ve spent the last month building next.jazzsequence.com — a Next.js-based reimplementation of jazzsequence.com that’s entirely headless without any loss of functionality. I think it’s great and I genuinely hope that you are reading this post on that site. but the thing that occurs to me, as someone who’s been doing this for 20 years is…
Have we actually learned nothing?
Because sure, AI can spit out a new, modern site and migrate everything out of WP or Drupal. But…to what? A new JavaScript-based site using the latest framework du jour?
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