Preston So is the Chief Commercial Officer at React Bricks and the founder of Decoupled Days, a nonprofit conference on headless CMS, AI, and content operations now in its ninth year (August 6-7 in Montreal). Over 22 years in the CMS industry, spanning Oracle, Acquia, Drupal, platforms written in Java and PHP, and now React-native tooling, Preston has watched every architectural wave move through enterprise content teams. His perspective on where things are actually breaking right now is one of the sharpest in the market.
This conversation lands on a problem most enterprise teams are living but not quite naming: the collaboration breakdown between designers, developers, and content editors. Both monolithic DXPs (priced at six or seven figures, bundled with tools most organisations never touch) and composable headless platforms (fragmented, developer-heavy, expensive to integrate) have failed to maintain what Preston calls the "through line," the shared context that connects design systems, content, and code. Now that AI agents need to operate across all three simultaneously, the absence of that through line is no longer just an inconvenience. It is an architectural gap.
React Bricks answers this with what they call a design system native CMS: built on modern React frameworks like Next.js and Astro, with visual in-page editing that keeps marketers within brand guardrails, and AI features shipping this month that generate complete landing pages from a short prompt, not just individual text fields, while keeping every component tied to design tokens and brand colours. Preston demos this live in the episode, including a real-time page build and a hiccup that makes it even more honest.
Key topics include:
• The composable overcorrection: headless platforms solved vendor lock-in but created a new problem, fragmented architecture and a collaboration layer no one fully owns. Preston argues the market is swinging back toward something with more structural cohesion.
• Design system native CMS: React Bricks treats the design system as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought, which matters for marketers who need brand consistency and for AI agents that need a stable, structured context to operate within.
• Vibe coding has a ceiling: a colleague of Preston's shared data with a clear inflection point. Once a company reaches $1M ARR, the clean-sheet approach breaks down. Stability, governance, and design system fidelity become non-negotiable.
• AI page generation vs. AI field generation: text field automation, alt text, and metadata are table stakes now. The harder frontier is generating complete pages within a design system from a short natural language prompt. React Bricks is shipping this now.
• The through line problem: both monolithic and headless CMS architectures severed the connection between designers, developers, and content editors in different ways. With AI agents now operating at every junction, that connection has to be rebuilt deliberately, and the CMS is the layer where it has to happen.
• Decoupled Days 2025: the ninth annual nonprofit conference on headless CMS, AI, and content operations runs August 6-7 in Montreal. Dotfusion is a sponsor and Chris Bryce is speaking. Tickets are $35 CAD early bird at decoupledays.com
Preston's central argument: as AI takes over more of the production layer, the collaboration infrastructure (who can edit what, within what constraints, across which personas) becomes the most important architectural decision a team can make. That is what the CMS has to solve for now.