Can AI Build a Real CMS? You're Looking At It.
Not a toy. A real CMS with media uploads, SEO fields, and categories. It's serving this blog right now.
Can AI actually build a CMS?
Can you vibe code a CMS? Heard this a couple times on X recently.
But yeah. Not a landing page. Not a prototype. A real content management system—the kind you'd actually use to run a blog, manage media, and publish SEO-optimized content.
I tried it. One-shotted with Stardeck. No code. No templates. Just a description of what I needed.
The result? The CMS that's serving this blog post right now.
The expensive alternative
Before AI, building a custom CMS meant one of two paths:
Path 1: Pay for SaaS. Contentful starts at $300/month for teams. Sanity charges by usage and gets expensive fast. Strapi requires DevOps knowledge to self-host. Wordpress is just boomer. And all of them force you into their structure—their content models, their limitations.
Path 2: Build from scratch. Hire developers. Wait months. Spend tens of thousands. Hope they understood your requirements.
Both options assume you're either wealthy or technical. Most people are neither.
What about other AI tools?
I've tried them all. Lovable, Bolt, v0. They're impressive for simple UIs and one-off pages.
But ask them to build a CMS? Unless you spend 30 minutes crafting an elaborate prompt, you get:
A pretty frontend with no real backend
Hardcoded content that defeats the purpose
A database schema that falls apart the moment you try to add categories
The inevitable purple gradient
They're optimized for demos, not production. Building something you'd actually use takes dozens of follow-up prompts, manual fixes, and eventually giving up and doing it yourself.
One conversation, one CMS
I opened Stardeck and typed: "Build me a CMS for a blog."
Instead of immediately generating code, Stardeck just asked some questions:
I just answered its generated UI form and then it was ready for me with a full plan to build it.
What it built
A complete content management system with:
Blog post editor with rich text formatting via TipTap
Categories for organizing content
Media uploads with Stardeck's included Cloud Storage
SEO fields for meta titles, descriptions, and keywords
Draft/publish workflow to control what goes live
Clean, designed UI that doesn't look AI-generated
Not a mockup. Not a prototype. A working system backed by a real Postgres database, with authentication, file storage, and proper data relationships.
I added a few follow-up features after the initial build—refinements, not rewrites. The foundation was already solid.
The proof is in the pixels
You're reading this on a CMS built entirely by AI.
Every word of this post was written in the editor Stardeck created. All these images are uploaded in the editor + uploaded to Stardeck's Cloud Storage that's just included with every project. The SEO fields too.
This isn't a demo. It's production. It's secure with a complete OAuth2 implementation that's provided by the Stardeck Platform. (Yes this one thing that wasn't vibe coded. Security is not vibe coded at Stardeck!)
And this isn't the first CMS built with Stardeck. maximkraft.com is a customer's blog was beautifully designed, fully functional, built entirely by someone who can't code.
Skip the invoice
No $300/month subscription. No $15,000 development project. No months of waiting.
Just a conversation that ends with software that works.
If you've been wondering whether AI can build real tools—not toys, not prototypes, but systems you'd actually stake your content on—the answer is yes.
You're looking at it.