“Unblocked is the brain that makes our agents actually work.”

Webflow gives everyone developer superpowers: one visual platform to design, build, and launch web experiences, with production-ready code generated along the way. Its productivity org has gone all-in on agentic development with Claude, Cursor, and Codex, and increasingly with remote agents that run tasks on their own through Flower, Webflow's internal remote-agent platform.

Across a codebase more than ten years old, the hard part was never getting an agent to write code. It was getting it to write code that fit. "I'm primarily involved with agentic development and enabling developers to ship cool code with agents," says Russ Nealis, a staff technical product manager at Webflow. To make that safe at scale, the team relies on Unblocked as its context engine: the layer that gives both engineers and agents the institutional knowledge behind the code.

The challenge: agents that start every task as strangers#

Before Unblocked, getting context at Webflow meant interrupting someone. "They would go into a Slack thread and tag somebody: 'Hey Mary, hey James, how do we do this thing?'" Russ said. "Or they'd look through a bunch of Confluence or wiki pages and go through the repo. It created a lot of interruptions and back-and-forth. It was not an efficient way to get information."

Agentic development inherited the same gap in a more expensive form. An agent could take in the repository as it exists today, plus whatever MCPs happened to be switched on, but not the reasoning behind the code, or which past decisions still mattered. Access to information was never the real gap. Understanding was. Without it, agents hallucinated, and some of Webflow's own engineers weren't convinced they could be trusted with real work.

The solution: a brain layer wired into every agent#

Webflow's fix was to give agents the same context its engineers rely on. The team connected Unblocked to Flower's sandbox over MCP, alongside the other tools an agent can reach, and the impact was immediate. "As soon as we plugged in Unblocked, the results got a lot, a lot better," Russ said.

The difference is visible in real time. "When Flower spins up the remote agent sandbox, you can see it reaching out to different MCPs," Russ said. "The most exciting one is Unblocked, because at that point you can see the agent itself gets it. The model's like, 'Oh, now I have the necessary information I need to actually deliver on the ask.'"

Inside Webflow, that capability has a name. Unblocked is the brain layer, the part of the stack that turns scattered data into usable understanding. "We have all the other MCPs that can access Slack history or GitHub, but what Unblocked does really well is pull all the information sources together, tease out what really matters, and get us the signal we need to actually do the thing," Russ said.

"There needs to be a brain layer to make all this work, and right now Unblocked is playing that role."

Russ Nealis — Staff Technical Product Manager, Webflow

The clearest proof came from the people who had been hardest to win over. "There were a handful of holdouts who weren't totally on board with agentic development. They could see a lot of hallucinations with agents," Russ said. "Once we turned on Unblocked and they started using it, those folks were some of the first to come around."

"Whoa, this one actually works. We don't know how, but please do not get rid of this tool."

Former skeptics — Webflow engineering

The results: less rework, fewer tokens, safer merges#

With the full picture up front, agents stop circling toward the answer, and they stop burning tokens getting there. "Because it's able to get all the context up front, it's much quicker to arrive at the thing that actually needs to be built versus going back and forth," Russ said.

"It saves a ton of tokens on our bill, but it also saves people a lot of time getting to what they actually want to deliver."

Russ Nealis — Staff Technical Product Manager, Webflow

It also stops agents from rebuilding work that already exists. "An engineer asked an agent to implement a feature, and Unblocked discovered it had already been implemented elsewhere in the codebase," Russ said. "That would've been an enormous waste of time to re-implement. Unblocked said, 'Hey, check out this PR that does exactly what you're trying to do,' and we short-circuited all of it."

Some of the value shows up as problems that never ship. Unblocked surfaces the reliability and security decisions from Webflow's past so they don't get repeated. "One of the big ones that's really important to me is reliability," Russ said. "Unblocked does a great job of looking through the corpus of data and past decisions around things that negatively affected our reliability, and making sure we do not make those mistakes again. That's a big win for us as a business, and for being able to deliver a better product to our customers." Much of that protection is proactive: "Unblocked thinks about the things you're not thinking about yourself that you should be asking about. I've seen folks say, 'Unblocked caught this prior security incident, this prior reliability incident that I hadn't even considered.'"

The gains extend to hiring. Unblocked shortens engineering onboarding. "We pay attention to the time to the tenth PR that a new employee merges, and I've seen that steadily shorten," Russ said. "Unblocked has played a big role. It's the most patient coworker in terms of answering questions new employees have about how things work at Webflow."

Who gets to build#

The biggest shift isn't speed. It's that building is no longer an engineering-only activity. Because agents start with real context, people who don't write code for a living can still ship it. Unblocked is the thing that goes out and gets the context, so they can put up high-quality changes that engineers can review and get into the product.

"Product managers and designers are now contributing code to the product. That would not be possible without Unblocked."

Russ Nealis — Staff Technical Product Manager, Webflow

The bottom line for engineering leaders#

Webflow didn't have to change how it documented or worked. Unblocked made the knowledge the team already had usable at the speed agents now demand. It is the memory layer that turns a stack of very smart tools into a team you can trust to ship. Russ's advice to any engineering leader adopting AI coding tools comes down to that difference:

"You've signed up for some very cool tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor. They have a very smart brain, but they don't have the memory they need to be as effective as they could be. Without that context layer, you're saddling yourself with an inability to unlock their full potential."

Russ Nealis — Staff Technical Product Manager, Webflow

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can be the context engine for your engineers and your agents.