Part 5 of the Heist Build Log. By now Heist could draft in your voice and publish reliably across platforms. But there was still one form of work left — and it was the sneakiest one.
The last chore was thinking
Once publishing was solved, I noticed the bottleneck had just moved. I wasn't reformatting or scheduling anymore. But I was still sitting down every week to answer the same tiring question: what should I even post about?
"Set it and forget it" is a lie if you first have to brainstorm a month of topics, write the briefs, and feed them in. That's still the hard part. That's still an appointment with a blank page. I didn't want to schedule content — I wanted to stop managing it.
The dream wasn't a faster way to make posts. It was opening the app to find next week already handled, and just nodding at it.
Autopilot
So I built Autopilot: a mode where Heist does the upstream thinking, not just the downstream typing.
You point it at sources of truth — your own website, a sitemap, an RSS feed, the places your real ideas already live. Autopilot pulls from them, finds topics worth posting about, drafts them grounded in your Brain, and lines them up on your calendar on the cadence you set. You go from "I owe myself a content session" to "I review what Heist already prepared."
The fear I had to engineer around
Handing a machine the keys to your brand voice is a genuinely scary thing to offer. Automated content has a bad reputation for a reason — most of it is obvious, generic sludge. If Autopilot posted garbage in my name, it would destroy the exact trust the whole product is built on.
So Autopilot is wrapped in guardrails:
- A quality floor. Every candidate is scored, and anything below the bar simply doesn't make the cut. Quantity never overrides quality.
- It's grounded, not invented. Topics come from real sources you chose — your actual material — not hallucinated out of thin air.
- You stay in control. Edit topics, adjust the schedule, approve before anything goes out. Autopilot proposes; you decide how much rope it gets.
- Your rules still apply. Every Autopilot draft passes through the same brand guardrails as everything else. It can't say what you told it never to say.
The goal was never a firehose. It was a thoughtful assistant who prepares the work and waits for your nod.
What this actually feels like
The first week Autopilot filled my own calendar with topics I'd genuinely have chosen myself, something shifted. Content stopped being a recurring obligation on my to-do list and became a thing that simply... happened, correctly, in the background. The guilt loop I described in part one — gone. Not because I got more disciplined. Because the system stopped requiring my discipline.
Who this is for
If you're a solo founder, a creator, or a small team where "content" is everyone's job and therefore no one's, Autopilot is the closest thing to hiring a content manager who already knows your brand and never forgets to show up. It's the feature that takes Heist from "a faster way to do the work" to "a way to mostly not do it."
Let it prepare next week for you
Start a free trial, build your Brain, point Autopilot at your sources, and let it draft next week's calendar. Then do the only part that should ever require you: glance at it, and hit go.
Put your content on Autopilot — start free →
Next: the business decision that scared me most — why I made you bring your own AI key, and what it taught me about trust.