Core concepts

Four objects, in a line. Understanding them explains most of the product.

Idea ──promote──► Draft ──approve──► approved ──schedule──► Slot ──tick──► published
                                                             │
                                                             └─ failed ─► retry or skip

Idea

A one-line thing worth writing about. Ideas live in Planning, in the Library view.

Where they come from, as recorded on each idea:

Source	Meaning
commit	Mined from git history
vault	Mined from a notes folder
manual	You typed it
research	Generated from a tracked video
import	Pushed through the API or MCP
backfill	Created by a historic backfill

Statuses:

Status	Meaning
new	In the inbox, not triaged
shortlisted	Kept for later
promoted	Turned into a draft
dismissed	Not doing it

An idea also carries a format (linkedin, reel, carousel, video) and a pillar.

Everything that pushes ideas from outside, the CLI and MCP, creates them at new. Nothing external can move one past that.

Draft

The actual content. Drafts live in Planning, in the list and calendar views.

Status	Meaning
draft	Being worked on. The only status you can edit freely from
approved	You signed off. Now it can be scheduled
scheduled	Has at least one slot booked
published	Went out
rejected	Killed. Recoverable back to draft

Types: linkedin, instagram, carousel, reel, video.

The approval gate

There is no transition from draft straight to scheduled or published. Approval is the only way out of draft toward publishing, and it exists in exactly one place in the code so it cannot be bypassed.

The one exception is Mark posted, which moves a draft to published because you posted it by hand somewhere. It records reality, it does not publish anything.

Schedule slot

A booking: this draft, on this account, at this time.

Status	Meaning
pending	Waiting for its time
publishing	In flight right now
published	Done
skipped	You cancelled it
failed	It went wrong

One approved draft can have several slots, which is how cross-posting works: the same draft to Instagram and Bluesky at different times, with different captions.

How publishing actually runs

A scheduler ticks every minute and dispatches due slots. Each publish is a background job with 3 attempts and increasing backoff.

Why a failed slot never double-posts

A slot moves to publishing before any network call, and the connector writes a journal entry immediately before the irreversible "go live" call.

So if a retry finds a slot where the commit was attempted, there was no clean failure, and no post id came back, it does not publish again. It fails the slot and asks you to verify manually. Posting twice is worse than posting late.

On failure, the draft stays scheduled rather than reverting, so you can inspect and retry.

Recovering a failed slot

In the Queue:

• Retry puts it back to pending. It does not re-run immediately, the next tick picks it up.
• Skip marks it skipped. One-way.
• Reschedule moves a pending slot to another time. It refuses a time already booked for the same account.

Brand and account

Brand is a workspace: its own profiles, drafts, connections, queue, metrics, contacts. In the API and in code a brand is called a team.

Account is the billing container. One subscription, owning one or more brands. How many comes from the brands allowance on your plan.

There is no account switcher, only a brand switcher, because you only ever have one account.

Content profile versus persona

Both feed the AI, and they are different things.

Content profile is per brand, and there can be several. Voice guide, pillars, accent colour, handle, default carousel template. It is picked per idea and per draft.

Persona is one per brand, set in Settings. Your niche, your audience, what to avoid. It grounds everything.

Rule of thumb: persona is who you are, content profile is how you sound.

Timezones

Two of them, deliberately.

Posting schedule timezone, set per brand in Settings, decides when your posts go out. This is the one you care about.

Deployment timezone is what the background jobs run in. It affects when metrics sync and when scans run, not when your content publishes.

What is automatic and what is not

Step	Who
Mining ideas from commits	Automatic, if you run the CLI
Generating ideas from research	You click a button
Writing a draft	AI, on your click
Approving	You. Always
Scheduling	You. Always
Publishing at the slot	Automatic
Posting an outreach comment	You, by hand. Postlyra never posts these
Replying to a DM	You type it, you click send
An automation's DM reply	Automatic, sending text you wrote and activated
Syncing metrics	Automatic, nightly