Using Claude to build things quickly is great - but once you hit a certain level of scale, or have a need for governed workflows & oversight, you're more or less going to want some sort of CMS. When that happens, you can either go it alone, or build on top of a lot of well discussed well thought through solutions to these sorts of problems that the Drupal community has dealt with for a couple of decades.

>You can just Claude Code all kinds of shapes of software.

Drupal is used at large organizations with hundreds of sites, thousands of users, and multiple more-or-less coordinated development teams. It's actually a great target for agentic coding, because it has such a well-established internal API. It can definitely feel like an anachronism, but I think there are few projects that could replace some of it's use cases. It's the B-52 of CMSs.

Claude still has to write software in a target language, often using an established framework, especially one with a lot of examples.

PHP is, in fact, exceptionally good as a language for creating websites.

One of the best things about Drupal (years ago, when I used to write plugins and themes), was that you could completely customize the backend, as well as the frontend, and that was a good thing, if you have low-tech users that author content. I despise having to walk people through WordPress' backend.

But that rewriting the base system, every couple of years, was why I dropped it.

Nowadays, with LLMs, it may be time to look at it again...

As someone who has recently started Pair Programming with LLMs—something I never managed to bring about with a human, sadly—I'd like to say: Sure you can do it. Sure, team up with a bunch of friends, a forest next door and build your dream cabin. Then compare that to a prefab from the Sears Modern Homes line. It's still 30'000 parts, 25 tons, est. 90 days build time, but it will be vastly easier, especially if one of your pals happens to be great at digging up and bringing together assembly instructions, general technical infos and past experiences from other builders for all the many snags you'll still hit when erecting that thing.

Can't answer the specifically "Drupal" part (as for me I once had a certain pressure behind me to use it, found it atrocious at the time and won't look to repeat that; if their software is much better / much more to my taste now, good on them). But in principle, at least from a certain app size upwards, I'd rather start with something working in principle, then improve on it.

That said, it might still be more difficult to get things right with Drupal than with some other softwares where you have better continuity between versions. At least traditional search engine results tend to handle version changes rather poorly meaning you'll get tons of advice that don't really apply anymore because they're years old. That happened a lot to me when trying to help out a friend with a WordPress installation.