Can AI agents replace your CMS ?

A thought for marketers building sites in the age of AI agents.

Last week, Cursor argued that the cost of CMS abstractions is starting to outweigh the cost of simply editing code with agents.

That idea is worth sitting with.

The traditional marketing stack — WordPress, Webflow, headless CMSs, plugins, databases — was built to make content editable by humans. But AI agents don’t work the same way humans do.

Agents work best when content is:

Plain text
Versioned in git
Grep-able
Structured, not hidden behind admin panels and database tables

magine a marketing site that’s just:

Static HTML / JS
No server app
No database
No CMS API in the request path
Publishing happens via git

You might still have a lightweight admin UI for drafting or exporting JSON, but the source of truth lives in code.

Why this matters:

With agent-friendly content, tasks like:

“Add a new section to the homepage”
“Fix broken links across all posts”
“Rename a taxonomy across the site” become single prompts, not multi-step workflows across dashboards, plugins, and schemas.

What’s surprising is how little effort this now takes. With modern agents, spinning up a static marketing site, migrating content, and generating basic tooling can happen in hours — not weeks.

The takeaway for marketers:

If your team is comfortable living in git (or can be), you may not need a traditional CMS or no-code builder anymore.

As agents get better, the abstraction tax of CMSs may become higher than the cost of working directly with code.

That’s a strategic shift worth paying attention to.

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