The Planner, a collection on autopilot
Turn it on and the collection picks topics, writes them with Auto-Pen, and publishes on a schedule. Every setting explained.
The Planner is the card under the Control Room's Setup → Delivery that says Off or On · . Its own description: Runs this collection on autopilot. It sources headlines from Curate, writes each piece with Auto-Pen, and publishes on the schedule.
Turn it on
Open the collection's Control Room, then Setup → Delivery. On the Planner card press Turn on & start publishing. It's a button, not a switch, so it can't be flipped by accident. Turn off pauses it; queued posts stay queued.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| What should this blog cover? | A steering prompt for which topics get picked. Not shown on phantom sites, which steer from their chosen clusters. |
| Posts per week | How many slots the schedule has, one to six. Six is the recommendation for a phantom; a company blog is usually two to four. It is also the week's budget: a post you ask for over the API spends one of these slots. |
| Timezone | The clock the schedule uses. |
| Start producing | How many hours before a slot the writing starts. Give it at least a couple of hours; a full piece takes 20 to 40 minutes. |
| Keep the collection's cadence goal in sync | Makes the collection's cadence target follow this number. |
| Express outline | Skip deep research and write from a quick outline. Faster and cheaper; use it for short, opinionated posts. |
| Brand mention | The mention policy for planner-written posts (inherits the collection's Auto-Pen setting). |
| Mode | Full autopilot: publishes at its slot, no human. Review window: publishes at its slot unless that falls inside the window. Manual approval: every piece waits for an explicit approval. A client blog starts on manual approval; a phantom on autopilot. |
| Review window | Hours after a piece is ready during which it waits for your approval rather than publishing at its slot. |
| Mark as published | Whether the Planner marks the post published in Letterstory, or leaves that to you. |
| Notifications | Three rows: when a piece is ready for review, when a piece is published, when something fails or the Planner pauses. |
Where topics come from
The topic map: open spokes, ranked by search demand and editorial fit, with spokes you added yourself prioritized until covered. The suggestions on the Headlines tab are ranked the same way the queue fills, so the top of the list is what gets written next. Queue Post on a headline gives it the next slot; the dropdown beside it offers Write now (produce it immediately) or Schedule for a date… (pick the day; a hand-placed date survives the schedule's own housekeeping). A dismissed spoke never comes back on its own.
When the open spokes run low, the platform extends the map within its existing pillars without asking. When every pillar is worked out, the Topics tab shows a banner with Add pillars; adding pillars is your call, not the Planner's.
If it pauses
After several failed runs in a row the Planner turns itself off. A yellow banner on the card names the reason and the latest error (for example, no writing kernel selected, or the usage allotment reached). Fix the cause, then turn the Planner back on; that clears the pause and resumes the schedule.
Over the API
The Planner is the cadence section of the collection's one-file configuration (KB-202). set_collection_config with cadence.enabled: true turns it on and materializes its publish slots: posts per week, timezone, sourcing mode, approval posture, and an optional steering direction. Approval defaults to manual for a client blog, so pass autopilot only when you're comfortable publishing with nobody in the loop. configure_collection is still there and does the same thing for the Planner alone.
Everything the Planner produces is an ordinary collection run, so list_collection_runs is the calendar and the history in one read: rows still scheduled are upcoming slots, and each row says whether it came from the cadence or from someone asking directly. run_collection with schedule_for books a slot yourself; approve_collection_run answers a piece waiting on you.
list_topics shows the open spokes; set_topic queues one for the next slot; get_cadence_progress shows pace against target. A planner-written post is a normal post: list_articles, get_article, get_published.