Six jobs, one round, and why the order is the point

Autopilot is a tab in the workspace, and it is off. Nothing in this article happens until you turn it on. Turned on, the default is one round a day, ready by an hour you pick.

A pass runs six jobs in the same order every time, and the order is not a layout decision. Between steps the round asks whether it can still afford the next one, and a no ends the pass. Which job you are standing in when the room runs out is therefore the whole design.

Each job below carries its ceiling and the thing it is built not to do. A card that lists only the capability is an advert.

Why the order is a budget and not a layout

The round takes the jobs in the order the code registers them, and registration order is run order. There is no scheduler picking a route through them and no branch that promotes one because the night looks busy. Six jobs, one order, every pass.

Each job declares roughly what it will cost before it starts. Four of the six declare nothing, because they only read rows your workspace already has. Two use the model.

That one behaviour turns an order into an argument. Put the drafting first and a workspace that reaches its ceiling wakes up to two half-written emails and no idea what arrived overnight. Put the free reads first and it wakes up to the whole picture and no drafts, which is the better morning.

A ceiling is honest about what it promises. It starts at five thousand credits, and what it guarantees is that the round stops, not that it stops to the exact credit, because a step is billed once it has run. Where it stops is the order's business.

First and then: the two reads that cost nothing

First, it counts the leads waiting. Your standing brief searches on its own schedule; this job reads what that filed and tells you how many are sitting unreviewed, with a link straight to them. It costs nothing to run, and it runs no search of its own, because you paid for that search once already. An empty brief, which is the default, means the search never ran and there is nothing to count.

Then it triages the inbox. What arrived in your connected mailbox since yesterday, counted and put in the briefing, so the morning starts with a number instead of a scroll. It costs nothing to run and replies to nothing: reading a mailbox and writing from it are two permissions, so connecting Google or Microsoft asks for calendar and mail as separate grants, and approving one does not approve the other. Neither is a Meet or Teams integration. Sell's meetings run in its own browser room on a link you send.

These two go first because after them the briefing is already worth opening: whatever the round does next, you know what is waiting and what came in.

Third and fourth: the first spend, and the work nobody invoiced

Third, it reads the tasks going cold. Overdue and high priority tasks get read properly, and the reading goes onto the task thread where the work already is rather than into a report you have to find. Up to five tasks a round. It never ticks one off: that was a decision, and it is written down as one. In your credits it lands on the task analysis line rather than the Autopilot one, because the analysis opens its own key.

It is third for two reasons. It is the first job with a cost to declare, so it is the first one the budget can refuse for being too big for what is left. And what you have already promised outranks what you might start.

Fourth, it finds the work that was never invoiced: a proposal the client accepted with no invoice against it, and the proposals that have been out long enough to have gone cold. Up to five of each a round. It raises nothing itself. It tells you, and the raising is yours.

The two money-shaped jobs sit next to each other and read different things: this one looks for the invoice nobody raised, the next for invoices that exist and are past their date. Neither raises anything and neither sends anything, and because every job has its own setting you can have the finding without the asking.

Then the money job, which asks whatever you have set

Fifth, it asks for money you are already owed. Invoices past their due date, with the note written and the amount and the date in it. Up to five a round. It never sends one on its own: money jobs ask, and no setting changes that.

This is the one job that overrides your settings in the direction of caution. Off still skips it, as off skips any job, but above that it files and waits either way: an invoice paid last week and reminded about anyway costs more than the reminder could recover.

That is the rule for anything that could commit money. It asks first whatever else you have set, which is why nothing in Autopilot today touches your money at all, and card collection is still being switched on in this deployment. The round writes; it moves nothing.

Last, the only job that can leave the building

Sixth and last, it writes to the clients who went quiet. A client whose record has sat untouched for a few days gets a short note, and in the morning it is in your Emails list, written but not sent, with the briefing linking you to it. Up to five notes a round. It sends none of them unless you have separately said it may, and set a limit.

Last is the only place this job can go. It can reach a person outside your workspace, and it is the other job that uses the model. If a ceiling ends a round, ending it here costs you a draft you will not miss. Ending it at the first job costs you the morning.

Sending takes two decisions rather than one, because the daily limit that arrives with the switch starts at zero. What else stands between this job and a stranger is a set of locks rather than an ordering, and the locks are a subject of their own.

Set this job to Ask me and it files what it would have sent, why, and roughly what it would cost, then stops. A proposal expires after a week rather than waiting on you indefinitely.

What the order buys you on a bad night

It adds up to one property: a round that runs out of room stops in the cheapest place there is, because the cheap work is already behind it. When a ceiling is what stopped it, the morning briefing says so, so a short night does not read as a quiet one.

And it is off. It ships off, sending ships off separately, and it comes with the Business and Professional plans. Turn it on and what you have turned on is six jobs, in one order, that draft. You press Send.

Questions this raises

If the round runs out of credits halfway, what do I lose?

The expensive half, which is the half you can afford to lose. The two counting jobs at the front cost nothing, so they have already run, and the briefing has the leads waiting and the mail that arrived whatever happens next. What a ceiling takes off you is a draft rather than the picture.

Can I switch off just the one job I do not want?

Yes. Every job has its own setting, so reading your overdue tasks and writing to your clients do not have to be the same decision. Off skips the job where it stands: nothing read, nothing written, no credit spent on it. The difference between ask me and just do it bites on the job that writes to your clients, which is what the approval queue is for. The money job files there and waits whatever you set it to.

Does the order ever change?

No, and it cannot drift quietly either. The order is the order the jobs are registered in the code, and the test that guards this site counts those registrations against the number of jobs the site walks through. Add a seventh job to the round and that test fails until somebody writes the seventh one down.