Content as files

Authoring with the tools the agent already has

Edit, Write and Grep cost an agent almost nothing, and a REST call per field costs it a turn. So the site projects to disk: one Markdown file per post, pulled, edited with ordinary tools and pushed back through a merge that knows the instance moved while you were working.

Read the docs The ten laws

One file per post, and the path is the URLP4

YAML frontmatter for the metadata and the fields, and the post's first rich-text field as the document body — with the file recording which field that was, so reading it back never needs the model. A URL is unique per site so the tree cannot collide, and the folder travels in frontmatter because the two namespaces are deliberately separate. A file whose path and url disagree is an error, not a guess: a half-done rename is a move on one side and a create on the other.

shio/content/acme/launch.md

---
postType: Page
title: Launching Shio 2026.3
status: DRAFT
folder: folder:acme/
bodyField: content
---

Shio is a CMS whose primary operator is a coding agent.

The field set is a table with a testP5

Ten keys travel, and everything a post carries that the projection drops is declared with a reason in a test. That table exists because a round-trip guard can test the values of fields the format has and cannot see a field it lacks — so the thing that would otherwise be discovered by somebody losing content is an assertion instead.

The merge happens in the projection's own domainP5

The base, the server side and the file side are all compared as the file tree holds them. Skipping that step was measured and it produced a permanent phantom change: a CRLF body read as a local edit on every pull, forever, and a drift check that failed on content nobody had touched. Fingerprinting the projected document alone is only half the fix — it converts the phantom into the opposite phantom.

Only the draft projects, and publish is an instructionP5

A publish key in a file travels forwards as an intent; the merge deliberately never writes state backwards into it. And losslessness beats prettiness — a value that would not survive the round trip stays as JSON in fields rather than being prettified into the body it cannot come back from.

Give your agent a CMS it can actually drive

Run it yourself, hand it to Claude Code, and keep the approve button. Open source, no hosted tier you are being funnelled towards, and the whole design argument checked into the repository.

$claude mcp add shio -- npx @viglet/shio mcp

Read the docs Read the source