Autopilot & Publishing
How autopilot discovers, drafts, and schedules new articles on your plan's cadence, with a review window before anything publishes.
Autopilot is the core of HarperFlow: once it's on, your site gets a steady stream of new articles without you starting each one by hand. This article walks through the loop it runs and what has to be true before it actually fires.
Each time autopilot fires, HarperFlow works through the same four steps:
Between steps 3 and 4 sits the veto window, the only review step in the loop. Nothing needs your sign-off to move forward; something only needs your attention if you want to stop it.
Autopilot only dispatches for a project that is:
Missing any of these doesn't produce an error message anywhere obvious; autopilot just quietly has nothing to do until the gap is closed.
Turning autopilot on anchors a weekly cycle to that exact moment: every 7 days from then on, HarperFlow works out how many articles your plan has left and spreads that many writing sessions across the coming week's business days, one article per session. See Run your blog on autopilot for the math behind the count and what turning it off does to already-scheduled drafts.
A session that doesn't fire, because something else is already mid-run for your project, or because of a transient error, isn't lost; it's simply retried the next time HarperFlow checks in rather than skipped for the week.
Note: A project stuck below 12 reviewed topic clusters, or with an unvalidated field mapping, will not error loudly anywhere. Check your project's readiness status if autopilot seems to have gone quiet.
