Lee Robinson

Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com off a headless CMS to plain code and Markdown files in three days, spending $260 in tokens across 344 agent requests. The resulting diff was 67 commits, 43,000 lines added against 322,000 removed, with build times cut in half. He worked at «Vercel» when the notes were written.

The migration write-up, "Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets" (December 2025), reads as an accounting exercise rather than a tooling preference. Robinson names five places a modern CMS architecture hides cost: user and access management across separate account systems, draft-mode preview with its extra authentication layers, internationalization workflows, CDN and asset delivery (the company had spent over $56,000 on CDN since September), and dependency bloat. His stated conclusion is that "le coût des abstractions avec l'IA est très élevé": coding agents work better against simple, direct code than against layered abstraction, so spending tokens to delete complexity paid for itself out of operational savings.

The earlier «article Personal Software» (January 2025) argues the opposite end of the same shift. Robinson expects non-developers, designers, marketers, product managers, to build single-purpose tools fitted to their own needs, and he expects that to raise appreciation for well-built software rather than displace professional developers.

Both pieces treat abstraction as something with a price that AI has repriced. Neither settles what happens to the people whose work was the abstraction layer.