AI agents belong in your CMS — with a leash

Shell access is a smell

The old “AI helper” pattern was: give the model SSH and hope. That’s not a CMS integration — that’s a liability.

A better pattern: scoped tokens, HTTPS only, no shell, content endpoints that match how humans edit.

What an agent should do

Rewrite a homepage hero

Fix SEO titles and descriptions

Upload an OG image

Publish a blog post

Export a backup package

What it shouldn’t do: rm -rf, edit PHP on the server, or hold a god-mode password in a chat log forever.

Forma’s Agent API

Create a token in Settings → Agents. Start with:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer fx_…" \
https://your-site.com/api/v1/help

Scopes carve the blast radius: content:read/write, media:write, settings:write, backup:read. Pair that with Cursor MCP and you get a workflow that feels like pair-programming the site, not the server.

The leash

Prefer HTTPS (Forma can require it)

Rotate tokens when they leak into chat (yes, including this one later)

Keep backups — agents move fast; so do mistakes

AI doesn’t replace judgment. It replaces the boring FTP round-trip.