It’s so entrenched. Everyone uses them. Every CMS has them. Forms: text fields, buttons, drop-downs.

“Maximum flexibility”, Big SaaS shouts. And presents yet another set of forms.

Away with forms. Away with CMS. Agentic AI is giving us back the way we built in the nineties.

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Your CMS makes everything look the same.

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The form as UI element is everywhere because it allows mere mortals to harness the power of SQL in an easy to use interface.

Your CMS backed website is standardised thus rigid.

You want the h1 there, do you? Wait in line until the developer has worked their way through the backlog.

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Everything that makes your website work on the internet is baked in at deploy time.

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Bring in the experts. The SEO expert. The content expert. The design expert. The security expert. The coding expert. The devops expert.

Their moment ends when the website is deployed to production.

You want json+ld? I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait until the next deployment.

In three months time.

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Conversational AI and Agentic AI show another way.

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We’re using our software development workflow with Claude Design and coding agents to rid ourselves of the rigidity that is CMS.

Our Product Manager creates tickets. Our Agentic AI does the ticket. Deploys to staging. They iterate.

Design. Hubs. Pages. Sections. SEO. Security. The PM has thé machine of the internet in their head and the detailed knowledge of every expert at their fingertips. Creates completely detailed instructions for the agent to follow.

We’re leveraging coding agents, MCP servers, AI skills and pipelines to deliver end-to-end flexibility.

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Our mindset is still hostage to the rigidity of the noughties. But we’re escaping it.

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Every design system developed for web is built around the constraints of CMS. The concept of reusable components itself is based on the premise that coding is the most expensive part.

Now that it’s not, a whole new territory exposes itself. But we’re still stuck in the restrictive past.

In the nineties, anyone with a plain text editor and the machine of the primitive internet in their heads could build a website. One person. They could build it just as they pleased.

They were not called webmasters for nothing.

But we’ve been battered down by CMS and forms for decades.

We still think in systems that have prevailed because of cost. The high cost of coding, the cost of the team of experts.

AI and AI-powered coding agents will free us.

Using a smart software development workflow with Agentic AI we’ll regain mastery. One person can build complexity that would previously require a team of experts.

Become a master.

Header Image: LUDWIG DEUTSCH | THE SCRIBE