Last week, Joost de Valk (creator of Yoast SEO) published a post called “Do you need a CMS?” His answer: probably not. He moved his own blog from WordPress to static HTML. No database, no admin panel, no CMS at all.
153,000 views. The WordPress world lost its mind. Matt Mullenweg responded by pointing to Elementor's new Angie AI and WordPress's MCP write capabilities. The message: we're adding AI too, stay calm.
I read both sides and thought: they're both right, and they're both missing something.
What Joost de Valk Gets Right
His core argument is simple. Most websites are just a handful of pages that rarely change. For those sites, a full CMS with a database, an admin panel, a login screen, and a plugin update queue is absurd overhead. He's right. If you're a developer who can work with static site generators, you don't need WordPress. You never did. The admin panel is a tool for people who can't write code. If you can write code, it's just in the way.
But here's what he's describing: a solution for developers. A technical person replaces one set of tools with another set of tools. That's fine for him. It's not a solution for the hairdresser in Rotterdam who needs a website by Friday.
What Matt Gets Wrong
Matt's counter is: AI inside WordPress. Let the AI write content, manage pages, handle updates. Keep the CMS, make it smarter. The problem with this is that it assumes the admin panel is worth saving. Have you looked at wp-admin lately? Really looked at it? Forty menu items. Settings screens that link to other settings screens. A media library that hasn't changed since 2012. Post meta boxes from the Bush administration. Adding AI to that interface is like putting a voice assistant in a cockpit. The cockpit is still a cockpit.
The Part Nobody's Saying Out Loud
Both sides agree on one thing, whether they realize it or not: the admin panel is the bottleneck. Not WordPress. Not PHP. Not the database. The admin panel.
De Valk's solution: remove it entirely. Go static.
Matt's solution: make it smarter with AI.
There's a third option. What if you keep WordPress as the engine, but the user never sees the admin panel?
What That Looks Like
This is what I've been building with SailWP (aff). You download a theme. Run the setup wizard. It asks you: what's your business? What do you do? Who's your audience? Then it generates your website. Not a template with placeholder text. An actual website with real content, proper structure, pages that make sense for your specific business. The AI doesn't live inside wp-admin. It replaces the need to go there.
Your SEO meta titles? Generated. Your page structure? Built. Your contact page, your about page, your services page? Done. If you want to change something, you describe what you want and it happens. No settings screen. No toggle. No “have you tried clearing your cache?”
WordPress still runs underneath. It handles the database, the hosting, the updates, the ecosystem. All the things it's actually good at. You just never have to think about it.
“But That's What Wix Does”
Sort of. Wix and Squarespace proved years ago that people want the basics built in. They don't want to assemble their website from parts. They want to describe what they need and get it. The difference: with SailWP, you own everything. Your data lives in a standard WordPress database on your own server. Your theme is GPL. You can export, migrate, or switch to any other WordPress setup whenever you want. Try doing that with Wix.
The locked-in simplicity of Wix, with the open infrastructure of WordPress. That's the gap.
What This Means If You Build WordPress Sites for a Living
I want to be honest about this part, because this audience is full of people who've built careers on WordPress expertise. The value of “I can install and configure WordPress” is heading to zero. It's already close, honestly. When a theme can handle the setup in two minutes, that skill isn't worth paying for.
But “I understand what businesses needm and can deliver it” is more valuable than ever. The people who thrive through this shift aren't the ones who know every wp-admin settings screen by heart. They're the ones who can sit across from a client, understand their business, and deliver a result.
The tools change. The skill stays. WordPress is infrastructure. It always was. The admin panel just made us forget that.
Where This Goes
De Valk is right that AI changes the game. Matt is right that WordPress isn't going anywhere. The answer is somewhere in the middle: WordPress as a quiet, reliable engine that runs your site while something smarter handles the interface. SailWP is one version of that. Others will build their own. Some will go further, some will disagree with specific choices. That's fine. The point isn't that SailWP is the answer. The point is that the question has changed.
It's not “do you need a CMS?” anymore.
It's “do you need to see it?”
