Autopilot & Publishing
How the autopilot toggle plans your week, the math behind the count, and what happens when you turn it off.
Run My Blog On Autopilot is the switch on your Home page that puts publishing on a recurring, hands-off cadence. This article covers what the switch actually does week to week; see How autopilot works for the discover-draft-schedule-publish loop it runs underneath.
Nobody's autopilot is on by default. After setup finishes, you get a one-time prompt asking whether to turn it on, write a single test article first, or just look around; if you skip that, the same switch sits on your Home page whenever you're ready. Turning it on requires an active paid plan or trial; a brand-new, unpaid workspace won't show a working switch yet.
The moment you turn it on, that instant becomes your weekly anchor: every 7 days from then on is one cycle. At the start of each cycle, HarperFlow looks at how many articles your plan has left and how many weeks remain until your quota resets, and divides one by the other, rounded to a whole article, to decide that week's count.
For example, 12 articles left with 4 weeks to go plans about 3 for this week. If you also write 2 articles yourself that week, nothing about the current week's plan changes retroactively, but the following week's math sees fewer articles remaining and automatically plans a smaller batch to match. You never get more than your plan allows; a slow week just means a lighter one, not a skipped one.
Once the week's count is set, HarperFlow spreads that many writing sessions across your business days, one article per session. Each article it writes is then scheduled to publish about a day later, never the moment it's written, so there's always room for the veto window before anything goes live.
Every article autopilot writes lands as a scheduled draft with a real publish time, and you get a veto email before that time arrives. See The veto digest and Article states.
Switching the toggle off stops planning new articles and asks what to do with drafts already on the schedule:
Warning: Credits already spent writing a scheduled draft aren't refunded either way, even if you choose to unschedule it.
Trials get their 3 articles planned across the trial week rather than the usual monthly cycle, so you see the full loop, discovery through a scheduled publish, before you ever pay.
If your plan's articles are already used up for the current period, autopilot plans nothing new until your quota resets. The switch stays on and picks back up automatically once it does; nothing needs re-enabling.
