The story behind Webamend

I spent ten years building production systems, most of them at Salesforce and Datorama. That kind of work teaches you a particular fear: not of writing code, but of being the person who has to be there when something needs changing. Systems that need their author around are systems that eventually stop changing.

Over the last year I built several static websites for clients: hand-written HTML or a minimal framework like Astro, one stylesheet, no database, hosted on Netlify for nothing. Done in days, loaded instantly, and the clients loved them.

I was looking for the right tool to give my customers the freedom to change their own website safely, without me. I did not find one.

What I did not want to build

The obvious answer was a CMS. But a form only changes what it was built to change, and it will not add a section or put a photo where there was none. To cover every request I would have had to rebuild every site as templates and fields, and the first request that did not fit a field would have come back to me anyway.

The other obvious answer was to let a coding agent do it. By 2026 the agents were good enough to make a one-line change to an HTML file reliably. What they were not was safe to point at a client’s repository. An agent with a GitHub token is an agent that can delete the repository. I had no interest in being the person who explained that.

What I built instead

So the question became: what would it take for me to trust an agent with a client’s site? And the answer turned out to be the same things I would want from a junior developer on their first week. A copy of the files, not the real ones. No credentials. No way to publish. A senior person reads the diff before it goes anywhere. A preview before it goes live. And an undo.

That is Webamend. The agent works in a sealed container with no Git, no tokens and no network. What it produces is checked against a policy file I write, which says what it may touch and how much. What passes becomes a pull request, in the repository the site already lives in. Netlify builds a preview, the way it does for any branch. The client looks at the preview on their phone and presses Publish. They can change what they like, as often as they like: every change is a commit in the repository, and any of them can be reverted.

The first real change merged on the 14th of September 2026. It was a line of text on one page. It was the most boring pull request I have ever been glad to see.

Why it is open source

Webamend is under the AGPL, and the same code that runs the hosted version runs on your own server for nothing. Part of the reason is reach: an open repository is how a tool like this gets found and tried. The other part is trust. You can read exactly what it will do to your site before you let it near one, and nobody is locked in: if I disappear, the pull requests are still in your repository and the software still runs.

Where it is now

Small. As I write this, Webamend runs on a handful of client sites and on my own, and I am connecting sites for other people by hand, one business day at a time. I would rather do that carefully than quickly. Every part of it is public: the code, the architecture, the sites it runs on.

If you look after other people’s websites and recognise those messages, I built this for you. If you have a question the site does not answer, write to me. I answer everything myself, for now.

Amit Malul Lev
September 2026
malulev.com · GitHub