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In September 2026, HubSpot’s blog published an article on the “agentic CMS”, to present its own CMS. The idea is sound: AI agents make the changes to a website, while a human sets the rules and stays in control. Yet it has a version that does without a CMS, and that is the one we use every day.
There, the site is a folder of files. Someone on the team writes their request in plain language, a coding assistant makes the change on a working copy, a preview page shows the result, and nothing goes live without review. Here is how it works, what you gain compared with a CMS, and what it does not replace.
In short
An agentic CMS hands website changes to AI agents, under human control.
Without a CMS, human control has a ready-made tool: the pull request, a proposed change, shown in preview, reviewed then accepted.
You gain a site with no admin interface or plugins to watch over, a complete history and automatic checks before every release.
Someone still has to review, and a site edited by dozens of people every day still benefits from a content editor.
What is an agentic CMS?
An agentic CMS is a content management system that includes AI agents able to act on the site autonomously, according to the goals and rules set by a human, and under their control.
The same article adds that you need to “set up approval workflows, access rights and autonomy rules to validate certain actions before they are carried out”. In other words, the agent proposes and the human decides. Software development has had a tool for exactly this for years: the pull request.
Definition
Pull request
A proposed change on a working copy of the site, called a branch. It shows what changes, line by line, and waits for a person to accept it. Once accepted, the change joins the live version; if refused, it disappears without leaving a trace on the site.
How do you edit a website without a CMS?
The site is built with a generator such as Astro: every page, every article, every offer is a readable file. A coding assistant, the AI agent in this scenario, can read these files, edit them and propose the result.
A website change, from request to release
- The request
Written in plain language, with the page URL. “Add this question to the FAQ and fix the lead time.”
- The branch
The assistant edits the files on a working copy, never on the live site.
- The preview
The pull request publishes a test version of the site, with its link.
- The review
A person looks at the page, asks for a correction if needed, then approves.
- The release
The accepted change goes live; undoing it is just as simple.
Every major AI vendor now offers an assistant that works this way. OpenAI’s Codex prepares the changes and opens the pull request when asked. Google’s Jules publishes it on GitHub. Anthropic’s Claude Code turns a ticket into a pull request, and the Code mode of Mistral’s Vibe takes a session through to its own. GitHub even makes it a rule for its own agent:
Draft pull requests created by Copilot cloud agent must be reviewed and merged by a human. Copilot cloud agent cannot mark its pull requests as “Ready for review” and cannot approve or merge a pull request.
The preview comes from the host. At Cloudflare, every pull request automatically gets a comment with the link to its test version. The reviewer never opens the code: they look at the page, like a visitor.
The model is catching on beyond websites. In April 2026, Twenty, the open-source CRM, backed every workspace with a repository, “so you can branch, review in pull requests, and roll back changes the same way you ship code”.
What do you gain compared with a CMS?
Nothing left to hack. A static site has no admin interface open to the internet, and no plugin to update in a hurry. That is where the vulnerabilities of a CMS like WordPress concentrate:
new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42% more than in 2024
of them in plugins, 9% in themes
with no vendor fix at the time of disclosure
weighted median time before a first exploitation
A complete history. Every change is recorded with its author, date and reason. Going back to last week’s version takes one sentence to request.
Checks before every release. The site is rebuilt and checked on every request: dead links, images without descriptions, titles that are too long, pages that do not display on mobile. With Astro, content even follows a schema: a content collection is a set of data with the same structure, and an article missing a required field blocks publication.
The whole team can ask. Nobody learns an admin interface: you write what you want, you review the result. Sales correct their offers, HR posts a job ad, management reviews, each in their own words.
Our guide Migrating to a static site with Astro without losing SEO covers the rest: speed, hosting, and what to preserve during the switch.
From the field
This site and Palmora Property, a real estate portal in six languages with more than 3,000 URLs that we run, are built this way, and we evolve them with AI every day. Every article starts as a draft in a pull request, with its preview link; publishing it means accepting that pull request after review. Automatic checks refuse, for example, an English page whose blocks do not match its French version.
What this method does not replace
Review. The assistant can make mistakes, misunderstand a request or touch a neighbouring file. The preview and the checks are there for that, but the decision to go live remains a person’s. If nobody reviews, do not open the door.
The setup. You need a site made of files, a repository, hosting that publishes previews, and written rules for the assistant to follow: where each page lives, what needs checking. It is an initial project, not an option to tick.
The content editor, for some sites. A media outlet where dozens of writers publish every day still benefits from a visual editor, connected to the same static site. We compare the two routes in Astro and Sanity headless: who edits what, and at what price.
Dynamic features. A form, a search or a customer area need services on top of the pages: our article on forms and search on a static site shows which ones.
Watch out
Never give the assistant the right to accept its own changes. The site’s main branch is protected: every change goes through a pull request, and only a person can accept it.
Where to start?
If your site already runs on files, with Astro or a Git repository, the method can be installed without a migration: request procedure, checks, publication on every approval and team onboarding. That is the “workflow alone” option of our offer, from €1,900.
If your site is on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, our static site migration, from €5,900, rebuilds the site with Astro, preserves search rankings URL by URL and installs the same AI workflow. Your team makes its first change with us, during onboarding. For a visual editor on top, the offer with Sanity starts at €8,900.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need to know how to code to edit a site this way?
No. The request is written in plain language, with the page URL. The assistant finds the right file, makes the change and publishes a preview: you review a web page, not code. The only technical step is approval, a button in the repository tool. One onboarding session is usually enough for each person to make their first change on their own.
What is the difference with a vendor’s agentic CMS?
With a vendor, the agents work inside its CMS, hosted on its servers, with its rules. Without a CMS, the site is a folder of files that belongs to you, which any coding assistant can edit, and approval goes through a standard tool, the pull request. You can change assistant or host without rebuilding the site.
What happens if the AI gets it wrong?
In most cases, nothing goes live: the preview shows the mistake at review, or an automatic check blocks publication, a dead link or a missing field for example. If a mistake still gets through, every change is recorded: going back to the previous version takes one operation, and the live site is corrected straight away.
Which AI assistant should you use?
Whichever your team prefers: OpenAI’s Codex, Google’s Jules, GitHub’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude Code or Mistral’s Vibe can all prepare a change and open a pull request. The choice comes down to the subscription price, the quality on your own requests and where your files are processed. The method stays the same.
Sources
- OpenAI, Codex Cloud documentation (new tab)learn.chatgpt.com
- Google, Jules documentation (new tab)jules.google
- Cloudflare, Workers Builds GitHub integration (new tab)developers.cloudflare.com
- Twenty, release notes 2.0.0 of 21 April 2026 (new tab)twenty.com
- Astro, content collections documentation (new tab)docs.astro.build
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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