Drupal CMS and the Rise of the Light Factory
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For most of my career, I thought I knew what Drupal was. But have you seen it lately?
Drupal started as a Content Management System. Then it became a web application framework. Eventually, as “DXP” became the industry’s buzzword, we started calling it a Digital Experience Platform.
And yet, I still hear people ask, “Drupal… is that still around?”
That question says more about how we think about software than it does about Drupal. We tend to define platforms by what they were, not by what they’re becoming.
More recently, I’ve seen Drupal described as an AI-enabled CMS. That’s certainly closer — but I still don’t think it’s the right way to think about it.
In a recent article, I argued that we’re already moving beyond those definitions — that Drupal is evolving into what I called an Agent Managed Content System (AMCS), where humans shift from being content creators to becoming Context Curators.
Sure, every one of those descriptions was accurate for its time. Each captured an important stage in Drupal’s evolution. But lately I’ve started wondering if they’re all still looking at Drupal through yesterday’s lens.
That realization didn’t come from the Drupal Community or Drupal itself.
It came from spending the past year immersed in a completely different world.
We’ve been living in a Flat Curve Society
I’ve been following Steve Yegge’s writing for a while.
Like many people, I enjoy his technical insights, but what keeps me coming back isn’t the technology. It’s the way he recognizes shifts before the rest of us have words for them.
Steve’s recent article on Gas City, and what he now calls Light Factories aren’t really about coding agents. They’re about something much bigger.
They’re about what software looks like when humans stop doing every task themselves and begin supervising systems that increasingly collaborate, reason, and make decisions on our behalf. (Medium)
We are seeing a plateau in intelligence. It is artificial: the exponential increase continues behind the scenes, gated away from you. And at some point you won’t be able to tell it’s getting better, even if you could see it. The intelligence curve is as real as the Earth is round, but just as flat from where you stand. Welcome to the Flat Curve Society,— Steve Yegge
The more I read Steve’s recent work, the more one thought kept coming back to me…
On paper, Drupal and Gas City couldn’t be more different.
Drupal has spent more than twenty years helping organizations manage content, workflows, permissions, and digital experiences. Gas City is a software development kit for building observable, long-running teams of autonomous agents. It’s solving a different problem for a different audience, using a completely different architecture.
And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that both communities were responding to the same underlying change in computing.
Throughout Steve’s recent writing, he contrasts Light Factories over Dark Factories, and that distinction really resonated with me.
- A Dark Factory implies software quietly doing work somewhere in the background, unmonitored and uninhibited.
- A Light Factory says something different. It says that if software is going to make decisions on our behalf, every decision should remain visible. Every action should be observable. Every handoff should be understandable. Governance isn’t something you add later. It’s part of the architecture from day one. (Medium)
I love that distinction, especially growing up in the age of Star Wars, and it just fits perfectly for Drupal. As I thought about that idea, I realized something…
Hold On… Drupal has been solving that problem for decades.
The Drupal community doesn’t usually talk about “agent orchestration.”
We talk about workflows, permissions, configuration management, revision history, content moderation, APIs and especially structured data.
Those topics rarely make conference keynotes, they aren’t flashy… but they’re exactly why some of the world’s largest organizations trust Drupal.
Reading Dries Buytaert’s recent article, The Privilege of AI in Open Source,, reinforced that thought for me. As Dries writes, “Open projects don’t just produce software; they create the knowledge, patterns, and architecture that intelligent systems learn from and extend.”
If that’s true, then Drupal’s greatest asset isn’t simply that it’s open source.
It’s that twenty-five years of community knowledge, governance, and architectural thinking are but has the potential to become one of the foundational governance platforms for the AI era.. (Dries Buytaert)
Over the last year
I’ve also been spending much of my time building agentic tools:
OSSA (Open Standard Software Agents) a vendor-neutral YAML schema that defines agent identity, capabilities, trust boundaries, and governance. Like OpenAPI standardized REST APIs, OSSA standardizes agent contracts.
DUADP (Distributed Universal Agent Discovery Protocol) a federated DNS + WebFinger + gossip protocol that enables any agent to find any other agent, anywhere on the open web.
Both began as passion projects after I saw important gaps in the industry. My hope is that, as intelligent agents become part of every enterprise, we can keep the definition of what an agent is and how agents discover one another open, interoperable, and owned by the community rather than controlled by any single vendor.
That work has changed the kinds of questions I ask.
A year ago I was fascinated by models. Today I’m far more interested in what happens after the model produces an answer.
- How does another system discover that capability?
- How do two organizations establish trust?
- How do permissions flow across systems?
- How is work delegated?
- How is context preserved?
- How do you explain why a decision was made six months later during an audit?
Those aren’t model problems
They’re organizational, platform, and ultimately governance problems.
That’s why I don’t believe the future belongs to a single AI model or orchestration framework. It belongs to the platforms that help organizations own their context, govern intelligence, and securely coordinate people, applications, and intelligent agents.
It belongs to the platforms that help organizations own their context, govern intelligence, and coordinate people, applications, and intelligent agents.
Models will become commodities. Context will become strategy. The future belongs to the platforms that help organizations own, govern, and continuously enrich that context.
Platforms that understand:
- Identity — knowing who, or what, is performing the work.
- Permissions — who can act, and under what authority.
- Contracts — how systems communicate through shared expectations instead of hidden assumptions.
- Context — preserving the knowledge that gives every action meaning.
- Audit Trails — making decisions explainable months or even years later.
- Interoperability — allowing specialized systems to collaborate instead of competing in isolation.
- Open Standards — ensuring the future belongs to ecosystems rather than silos.
In many ways, those have always been Drupal’s strengths.
Looking across today’s Drupal ecosystem, I can’t remember a time when I’ve been more optimistic.
You can see it in the quality of the work being produced and in the countless hours that contributors have invested across the ecosystem. Projects like AI Core, AI Context, Tool API, Modeler API, MCP integrations, ECA, Canvas, and Drupal’s long-standing strengths in configuration management aren’t isolated innovations — they’re part of a much larger movement. (Drupal.org)
Let me be clear, that’s a very different future than simply adding AI to a CMS, but what excites me isn’t any one module.
It’s what they become together. For the first time, I’m starting to see the pieces of a platform that doesn’t simply integrate AI, but has the potential and already is a tool for govern it.
Drupal has evolved into a platform where people, content, business processes, applications, and contextually intelligent agents collaborate while organizations retain ownership of their context instead of surrendering it to proprietary AI platforms.
Maybe that’s why Steve’s writing resonates with me so much.
- Gas City approaches the future from the orchestration side.
- Drupal approaches it from enterprise application management.
And if you really think about it:
- One starts with autonomous workers and asks how to govern them.
- The other starts with governance and is naturally evolving toward autonomous workers.
They’re taking different roads, but they seem to be heading toward many of the same architectural principles: composability, declarative systems, durable context, explicit contracts, observability, and governance by design. (Medium)
— I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
The Future is Open
None of us knows exactly what enterprise software will look like ten years from now.
But I do know this: whenever two communities working independently begin arriving at the same architectural conclusions, I pay attention.
It usually means we’re witnessing something larger than a technology trend.
We’re watching the emergence of a new operating model.
As someone who’s spent over two decades building enterprise Drupal platforms and who now spends his days thinking about open standards for intelligent systems, that’s an incredibly exciting place to be.
One more thought… I’d love to be a fly on the wall listening to Dries Buytaert and Steve Yegge talk about the next generation of enterprise software. One has spent the last twenty-five years building one of the world’s most successful open source application platforms. The other is helping define what contextually aware, multi-agent systems might become.
I can’t help but wonder how much their perspectives overlap, and , I am a huge fan of both of these visionaries.
This post originally appeared on Medium.com on July 1, 2026.