What Is an Agentic CMS?
Your CMS shouldn't require a vendor's permission to evolve.
That sounds obvious. But if you're using Sanity, Contentful, Strapi - any of the headless platforms - that's exactly what you have. A product someone else controls. A roadmap someone else sets. Configuration screens instead of code you own.
There's a different approach emerging. We're calling it an agentic CMS, and while the term is new, the concept addresses something teams building with AI have started to feel: the friction between how fast they can move on their application and how slow they move on their content infrastructure.
An agentic CMS is content management infrastructure you own and evolve with AI tools, rather than a product you subscribe to and configure. The entire CMS lives in your repository. Your AI development tools - Claude, Cursor, whatever you're using - can modify any part of it. You don't upgrade it; you extend it continuously as your needs change.
Why This Is Emerging Now
Traditional CMS tied your content to your presentation layer. Headless CMS separated them - content in a repository, presentation wherever you want it. That was a genuine step forward.
But headless platforms brought their own constraints. Configuration interfaces. Vendor opinions baked into the product. The gap between what you need and what the product does, filled with workarounds. And an upgrade cycle that moves on someone else's timeline.
None of that mattered as much when building custom infrastructure was expensive and slow. The calculus was simple: buy the product, accept its limitations, work around the edges.
That calculus is shifting. AI tools have gotten good enough that building custom infrastructure can now be faster than configuring general-purpose products. When you can scaffold a content management system in hours instead of months, the "build versus buy" question has a different answer.
The shadcn Mental Model
If you've used shadcn/ui, you already understand the core pattern.
Traditional component libraries: install a package, receive updates, hope the maintainer's priorities align with yours. shadcn flipped this: install the actual source code into your project, own it, modify it directly. You never "upgrade" - you evolve.
An agentic CMS applies the same principle to content infrastructure. Install it, own it, extend it with AI tools working directly in your codebase. The CMS becomes as malleable as the rest of your application.
What does this look like in practice?
Schemaless backend. No database migrations when you add a content type. Define your schema in code with Zod for validation, and the backend accepts whatever structures you need. This removes one of the biggest friction points in rapid iteration.
Emergent components. Instead of choosing from a predetermined menu of content blocks, components emerge from what you actually need. Feed a screenshot to your AI tool, describe what you want, and it builds the component along with the CMS interface to manage it. The system grows from your requirements, not from a product roadmap.
Full codebase access for AI tools. Your Claude session or Cursor instance can modify any part of the system because you own all of it. The CMS isn't a black box you configure through an admin interface. It's code you control. It’s becoming more important that you can drive changes to your applications agentically.
No upgrade treadmill. Something doesn't work the way you need? Change it. Today. Not "submit a feature request and wait."
What You Get and What You Don't
We'll be specific here, because vague capability claims aren't useful to anyone.
We built an agentic CMS (we’re calling it Tap Dance) to pressure-test these ideas. The base system took about two hours. Full functionality, including edge cases, content linking, and multi-brand support with switchable design systems, took about two days.
What's in the 60-70% you get:
- Content types with custom fields (text, rich text, images, references, arrays)
- Media management with cloud storage integration
- Multi-space architecture for different brands or environments
- Preview functionality
- Search and filtering
- Basic editorial interface for creating and publishing content
- Component-based page building
What's in the 30-40% you don't get (without additional work):
- Granular user permissions and role-based access control
- Editorial workflow with approval chains and scheduled publishing
- Version history and content comparison
- Real-time collaborative editing
- Sophisticated asset management (automatic transforms, CDN optimization)
- Localization and internationalization infrastructure
- Plugin ecosystem and third-party integrations
- Enterprise audit logging and compliance features
That missing 30-40% is real. For teams with large editorial operations, complex approval workflows, or regulatory requirements, those capabilities matter. The established platforms have spent years building them.
But here's what we've observed: most teams don't need the missing 30-40%. They're paying for workflow complexity designed for large editorial teams when three people touch content. They're navigating admin interfaces built for enterprise when they just need to ship.
If you actually need enterprise editorial workflow, buy Sanity. If you need 70% of the functionality and want to ship in days instead of months, the math has changed.
When This Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)
An agentic approach fits when:
- Speed of iteration matters more than editorial workflow features
- You have development capacity and want to own your infrastructure
- Your content needs are evolving rapidly and unpredictably
- You're already building with AI tools and want your CMS in the same workflow
- Your editorial team is small and doesn't need complex permissions or approval chains
Established headless platforms fit when:
- You have large editorial teams with approval workflows and compliance needs
- You're publishing to many channels with sophisticated asset requirements
- You need granular permissions, audit logging, or regulatory compliance
- Your content operations are more complex than your development capacity
- You want a mature ecosystem of integrations and don't want to build connections yourself
This isn't about one approach being better. It's about understanding which constraints actually apply to your situation.
The Broader Pattern
This isn't really about content management. It's about what happens across the stack when building becomes faster than buying.
We're seeing it everywhere. Design systems that evolve agentically instead of waiting for version updates. Internal tools built in days instead of licensed annually. Custom micro-SaaS replacing bloated enterprise platforms.
The status quo (subscribing to general-purpose products and accepting their opinions about your workflow) is becoming the slow option for teams that can build. The teams that figure out how to own and evolve their infrastructure will move faster than teams still waiting on vendor roadmaps.
Working software shipped regularly creates truth. The truth we've found is that you can build a CMS in two days that handles most of what you actually need. Whether that applies to your situation depends on which part of the capability spectrum you're actually using.
We've been using Tap Dance on client projects to test where this approach works and where the established platforms still make sense. If you're evaluating content infrastructure and want to think through the tradeoffs for your specific situation, we’re genuinely curious what you're finding.