A road report from Codegarden 2026 — Umbraco's bet on AI, the new Automate tool, and reusable content arriving in version 18.
This year's Codegarden, Umbraco's annual conference, gave us a clear look at where the platform is headed.
Codegarden is the one conference I go to every year, and it continues to feel like an outlier compared to other tech conferences. Depending on your mood going in (and your appreciation for a little whimsy and chaos), Codegarden is either the most fun you’ve had at a conference, or it’s a bunch of good talks with some weirdness going on in between.
The soul of Codegarden speaks to the core of developer experience: it’s still cool and fun and wild to think up an idea, try it out, and bring something new into the world — all with just a bit of typing. The simple act of creation reminds us of the joy and spark we got the first time we solved a complex problem through code. Codegarden is designed to reach back and fan that spark.
That’s good, because it’s needed right now. Software development as a discipline is still coming to grips with a new reality. For many experienced developers, starting to work with AI-driven development feels like handing the game controller over to your little cousin, and you’re just explaining to him how to beat the level instead of playing yourself. Even worse, your little cousin is getting good. It’s easy to think you might not get to play anymore at all.
But once you realize how much further you can go with AI as a development partner, it starts to get fun again. Development teams that have built new processes around these new tools have seen incredible boosts in productivity. It’s clear from their output that Umbraco HQ is one of those teams, and the proof is in how much has been developed over the last few months.
Codegarden is as much an experience as it is a conference, but for now let’s focus on the information and what we’re bringing back to our partners and team.
Umbraco's two-track approach to AI.
Digital experience platforms (DXP) are, despite their integrations, ultimately a suite of products. Most vendors have approached AI as a new product that sits in the middle of their suite, orchestrating connections between the products. This approach delivers quick value, but creates a silo that shifts the center of your AI efforts into the DXP itself. Umbraco has taken the alternate approach — they understand you are already working with an AI tool, so they’ve worked to make their products integrate with your existing solution. They've broadly categorized these efforts into two categories: "Umbraco in AI", and "AI in Umbraco"
"Umbraco in AI" refers to integrating Umbraco into your existing AI pipelines. The chief tool in this approach has been the Umbraco MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which has received steady updates since its release. But it also covers development powered by large language models (LLMs) to build Umbraco sites. The Umbraco team, along with the new volunteer AI Community Team, has added a broad set of AI skills that help to guide tools like Claude Code, Copilot, and others to write best-practice code when developing for Umbraco.
"AI in Umbraco" is primarily the work of the Umbraco.AI packages, which provide AI assistants within Umbraco itself, again using your existing LLMs. The tools provide a way to build up sophisticated agents, including setting prompts, context, guardrails, and tools in order to provide editors with custom agents that can take a share of the work.
Automating actions with Umbraco Automate.
While this approach to AI helps quickly bring Umbraco up to speed with your existing AI efforts, Umbraco AI so far only takes action when you trigger it via a prompt, like most chatbot tools. Many of those tools are adding workflow functionality to deal with this limitation, so that the work can be triggered by other actions or on a schedule.
And, so is Umbraco. Their answer is the newly released (in beta) Umbraco Automate. Automate provides a full graphical trigger-and-action chain editor, similar to n8n and Zapier, directly in Umbraco.
As a new tool, it will need a lot of new connections and integrations to reach feature parity with those other tools sporting hundreds of integrations, but given the pace of development this is likely to only be a temporary issue.
Reusable content arrives in version 18.
A major feature of Umbraco’s roadmap for a while now has been reusable content. The new version 18 sees the first step on that plan reach production with the release of the Element Library. “Elements” is the term that the Umbraco team have coined to describe the components that can be used across multiple pages.
Right now these Elements are available for use in individual page properties; they’ll be added to the layout editors in the next release.
Backoffice quality-of-life improvements.
Everyone wants to talk about AI integration and new AI tools, but the things that got the biggest cheers from the crowd at Codegarden were the little quality-of-life improvements added to the Backoffice, Umbraco’s editing interface.
Since its switch to a new architecture in Umbraco 14, there have been a few places where editors had preferred the design in older releases. A lot of those have been addressed with new interfaces that smooth out the few remaining rough edges.
Where Umbraco is headed.
With the new releases to the content management system, as well as improvements to Cloud and their other products, it feels like Umbraco is still on a good track to make the platform more useful and appealing to enterprise customers, while still providing a great experience for its existing user base.
Umbraco’s real strength comes from its active and vibrant community of open source contributors. As always, the real fun begins now that those folks have access to the new features. With Codegarden 2026 in the books, they’ll be hitting the ground running, reminded again of that joy in building something cool. I’m excited to see what’s next.
