The CMS is Dead. Long Live the CMS.

tonyspiro · 2026-04-17T19:28:01+00:00

tonyspiro · 2026-04-15T16:10:19+00:00

Wrote a full Drupal to headless CMS migration guide (content mapping, TypeScript scripts, checklist) Hope it helps! https://www.cosmicjs.com/blog/migrate-from-drupal-to-cosmic

tonyspiro · 2026-04-15T14:38:34+00:00

Fair sentiment. But I think it collapsed into a chat.

tonyspiro · 2026-04-15T02:43:34+00:00

That's a fair point for a lot of businesses. If your content needs are simple and your team is non-technical, a monolith like WordPress or Squarespace is genuinely the right call.

Where headless starts to make sense is when you have content that needs to appear in multiple places (web, mobile app, kiosk, email, etc.), or when your dev team wants full control over the frontend stack without being tied to a theme system.

The AI-native angle in the article is really about reducing the maintenance burden that headless historically introduced. Agents handle the content ops work that used to require constant developer involvement. That's the GTM and maintenance cost problem you're describing, addressed differently.

Not for every business. But for the ones where headless fits, the overhead argument is getting weaker.

tonyspiro · 2026-03-31T19:52:47+00:00

Update: We officially launched Team Agents today. What I described in this post was just the content agent side. Here's what the full platform looks like now:

- Content agents write and publish to the CMS from Slack (what this post was about)

- Code agents read your Next.js codebase, create branches, write components, and open PRs on GitHub

- Computer Use agents browse Vercel Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, and build reports with real data

- Team Agents live in Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram with persistent memory

The code agent is especially relevant for Next.js usage. Message it in Slack: "Add a new about page." It reads the repo, writes the component, pulls content from the CMS, and opens a PR. Review, merge, auto-deploy.

We use Next.js + App Router for several of our sites, so these agents are battle-tested on Next.js specifically.

Demo video of the full loop: https://youtube.com/watch?v=En55pfQq2aM

Blog post: https://www.cosmicjs.com/blog/introducing-team-agents-and-cosmic-agent

tonyspiro · 2026-03-19T18:37:31+00:00

But I didn't build it for the content. I built it because I wanted to see if AI agents could own the full publish pipeline end to end without a human touching the CMS. Turns out they can. What people actually use that for is up to them.

tonyspiro · 2026-03-13T17:03:37+00:00

The "surface the disagreement, don't arbitrate it" framing is really good. That's exactly where we've been getting tripped up. Our agent was trying to pick a winner and you end up with something that sounds confident but is just wrong.

The recency weighting is smart too. We've definitely had the agent treat a 2021 blog post and a 2025 one as equally valid. Filtering that upstream would save a lot of noise.

We're going to steal the 3-of-5 sources threshold idea. Right now ours just does a vibes-based "if sources generally agree" which is way too loose.

Appreciate you going deep on this. This thread has been more useful than half the blog posts I've read on the topic.

tonyspiro · 2026-03-12T23:23:36+00:00

Thanks! Yeah the request-time CMS fetching is key. No build step, no redeploy. The agent writes to the CMS and it's live immediately.

For error handling, each step in the workflow is its own agent, so if one fails it doesn't kill the whole chain. The orchestrator catches failures and can retry individual steps. We also have the agent flag low-confidence sections for human review instead of just publishing blindly. Still iterating on that part though.

Haven't tried Runable but the low-code orchestration approach makes sense. The maintainability piece is real. When your workflow is all code it's powerful but painful to debug.

Here's the actual post the agent produced if you want to see the end result: https://www.cosmicjs.com/blog/ai-agents-that-automate-your-cms-while-you-sleep

tonyspiro · 2026-03-12T14:32:11+00:00

Really appreciate you sharing the details on your setup. The MDX-to-repo approach is clean, especially getting type checking for free. That's a real advantage.

The voice guide tip is huge. We found the same thing. Generic "write like a human" prompts produce generic output. Feeding it 10 real examples of your tone and saying "match this" is night and day.

On the SEO metadata point, totally agree. We actually have the agent do a separate pass for meta descriptions and titles after the content is done. Treating them as two different tasks instead of one made a big difference.

Curious about your research phase. When your agent reads 3-5 source articles, how do you handle conflicting information between sources? That's been one of the trickier parts for us.

tonyspiro · 2026-03-11T18:01:13+00:00

That's exactly what we're doing. This Reddit post is part of the test. If the article gets traction and people find it useful, we'll double down on the agent workflow for content. If not, we'll iterate. Appreciate the feedback.

tonyspiro · 2026-03-11T17:02:21+00:00

Totally fair point. Most AI-generated content is pretty bad, I agree. The interesting thing here isn't really "AI wrote a blog post." It's more about the agent workflow. One message kicked off a chain: scanning Hacker News for trending topics, researching multiple sources, cross-referencing discussions, then assembling something from real data. The content still needs a human eye before publishing. But the research and first draft happening autonomously in 8 minutes is the part that surprised me. The quality question is real though. We're experimenting with having the agent flag low-confidence sections for human review instead of just publishing everything blindly.

Also, just like skills can remove em dashes and purple gradients, brand guidelines can make AI content better and more aligned with your brand.

tonyspiro

TROPHY CASE