Chisel CMS was Beach's hosted headless CMS. An open source React application, it wrapped Parse Server to turn Forge Ignite backends into a full content platform: editing, content modelling, APIs, and SDKs for consuming content in apps and sites.
Authors worked in a CMS dashboard. Developers consumed structured content through APIs. The split was deliberate: content management without coupling authors to code.
Why we built it
Parse Server gave us a capable backend. Forge Ignite made it deployable. What was missing was the editorial layer: a way for non-developers to model content types, edit entries, and publish without touching a repository.
Chisel filled that gap. Flexible content modelling for teams that needed more than flat files. REST and SDK access for teams building apps and dynamic experiences on top of Ignite. A hosted service so customers did not have to run CMS infrastructure themselves.
How it connected to The Beach Way
Chisel widened who could contribute to a publishing quest. Marketers and editors left structured trails in a content model rather than ad hoc documents. Developers consumed those trails through APIs and built experiences on top.
The model assumed content and code lived in separate places, synced at integration time. That was standard practice for headless CMS platforms. It worked, until the workflow changed.
What happened
Agentic development changed the equation. Tools like Claude and Cursor, combined with Hammer and its CLI, made it practical for authors and agents to work directly in the filesystem and Git. Content lives in source files, versioned alongside code, and generated at build time.
A hosted CMS dashboard became redundant friction. Agents edit markdown and HTML. Hammer compiles. Forge deploys. The content model moved from a React admin UI into the repo and the agent workflow.
Chisel was deprecated in favour of Hammer Content and agent-driven publishing. For static and content sites, this is strictly better: one source of truth, full history in Git, no sync layer between CMS and build. For dynamic Ignite apps, structured content still lives in Parse, but the editorial patterns we pioneered in Chisel inform how we think about content in agent-native workflows.