I took back control of my website. What will CMSs be for tomorrow?

This weekend, I felt like I was completely taking back control of my website, gregtaieb.com. And it made me seriously think about the future of CMS.

My intuition, after these few days: when AI makes it this easy to control both the content and the container, the value of a CMS is no longer found in its ability to produce pages. It lies in everything around publishing: the rules, the permissions, security, working together. Here's what leads me to this conclusion.

From WordPress to Ghost, then to vibe coding

A little flashback. For several years, I have had a personal site where I bring together my articles, my projects and my experiments.

First on WordPress, then Ghost to bring together my site and my newsletter. Until I published too little to justify continuing to pay a subscription: Ghost's hosted offerings start today at 18 dollars per month, billed annually.

So I exported my content and recreated a site entirely in vibe coding, in spring 2026, with the same methods as those I describe in my conversations with AI to create applications. A minimalist, but functional version.

And this weekend, I wanted to give it new life.

One weekend, four assistants and 71 modifications

In less than an afternoon, I was able to:

• completely rethink the design and navigation;
• reorganize and categorize my content, now arranged in columns;
• reintegrate around forty podcasts previously scattered on YouTube, by generating articles from their transcriptions: they are now brought together on the podcast page (in French);
• create detailed pages to present my iOS applications and my other projects, like Trip Control or Hiku, with their history, the difficulties encountered and the technical choices;
• and even imagine a small interactive city where each building represents a theme of the site, to offer another way of navigating. It can be visited on the Map, and I explained why I transformed my site into a city.

The site history keeps track of all this: 71 modifications recorded between Saturday October 31 and Sunday November 1. And they don’t come from just one tool. I had four assistants working in parallel: Lovable, on which the site was born, Codex, Claude Code and Cursor. Each on its own task, each proposing its changes, and me deciding what goes into the site.

Becoming the conductor of your own site

But ultimately, it was not the speed of execution that impressed me the most.

It’s this rather exhilarating feeling of being able to become the conductor of my entire site. The substance. The form. The features. The user experience.

An idea for a feature? I can test it immediately.

A new way to organize my content? I can apply it to the entire site.

An editorial change? I can work on dozens of pages in a single operation, with the help of AI.

The best example is the editorial line itself. I wrote it once, in an instructions file that the assistants read before working: each article belongs to a section (Field test, Build log or Point of view), begins with a summary in a few points and should never invent a figure. In a classic CMS, these rules often live in a separate guide. Here, they apply to each new page.

And above all, I can go much more directly from the idea to its realization.

What a CMS did for me, and that I had to rebuild

This is where the experiment gets interesting, because it also shows what I was really paying with my subscription. For the site to stand up, I had to rebuild, with AI, building blocks that a CMS provides without you even thinking about it:

• the newsletter: a registration form, a database where the addresses cannot be read by anyone other than me, and synchronization with the sending tool;
• administration: a reserved space, with a rights check done on the server side for each request, because a check in the browser does not protect anything;
• SEO: an HTML page generated for each article with its title, description and sharing image, and a site map kept automatically updated;
• translation: an English version generated for each publication, with a manual correction file when the machine makes a mistake;
• reading by AI: a Markdown version of each article, an llms.txt file and an MCP server so that assistants can query my content directly.

None of this was out of reach. But each of these building blocks is now my responsibility: if it breaks, no one will repair it for me.

Nothing magical about it

Obviously, none of this is magic. I have behind me hours of practice, experimentation, mistakes and corrections, part of which is recounted in the story of my first iPhone app. And you always have to check what the AI produces.

A concrete example, taken from this article: its automatic translation into English turned “Le fond. La forme.” (“The substance. The form.”) into “The bottom. The shape.” Nothing unusual for a machine, but no one would have seen it if I hadn't proofread. With four assistants editing the same site, proofreading is not an option: it’s the heart of the work.

The tool is now shaped around ideas

But something has profoundly changed in my relationship to web creation.

Before, I had to learn to work with the possibilities of my tool. Today, I can shape the tool around my ideas.

And I find this paradigm shift quite dizzying.

CMSs have understood they must become steerable

This does not mean that WordPress, Ghost or other CMS will disappear tomorrow. They meet real needs, particularly in terms of governance, security and collaboration. And their weight remains immense: WordPress runs 39.5% of all websites, or 58% of sites whose CMS we know, according to W3Techs.

Above all, they do not stay still. In February 2026, WordPress.com built an AI assistant directly in the editor, capable of changing the layout and style of a site through conversation. The same month, the WordPress team presented an MCP adapter which allows assistants like Claude Code or Cursor to act on a WordPress site, with only the permissions of the user they work for.

This detail seems essential to me. The CMS no longer presents itself as the place where you create your pages, but as a framework in which agents can work without breaking everything: who has the right to publish, modify, delete, and with what validation.

Where a CMS’s value will lie tomorrow

For a solo creator like me, the answer is already clear: a tailor-made site has become a realistic option, provided you accept being your own technical team. Total freedom, and total responsibility.

For an editorial staff, a company or a marketing team, it’s different. As soon as there are several authors, validations, personal data or legal obligations, what I reconstructed by hand becomes exactly what we expect from a CMS: well-defined rights, a history, proven security and a clear framework for agents.

My provisional conclusion: the CMS of tomorrow will be worth less for its themes and its extensions than for the trust it brings. It will become the guarantor of the rules rather than the workshop where pages get made.

But this experience leads me to ask myself a question: if AI now makes it this easy to control the content and the container, what will be the real added value of a CMS tomorrow?

I'm curious to hear your opinions.