Social Content Engine

# Social Content Engine

Keep the owner posting consistently, on brand, in their own voice, without them opening Canva.

Owners do not stop posting because they lack ideas. They stop because posting falls off the list when a job runs long. So this skill holds the calendar between sessions and always leaves the next few weeks already drafted. The second thing owners say is that AI content does not sound like them — that is the adoption barrier, so voice comes first, before any design is generated.

## Step 1 — Learn the voice before writing anything

Read [the shared voice profile](../../shared/voice-profile.md). Every skill that writes in the owner's name reads the same file, so a correction the owner makes once holds everywhere.

If no profile exists, build one from their existing posts, newsletter, and sent mail, then confirm it. Do not guess a personality — a guessed voice produces exactly the generic copy the owner came here to avoid.

## Step 2 — Hold the calendar, don't rebuild it

Read `reference/calendar.md` for the standing-calendar format and cadence guidance. The calendar is the durable artifact. On each run, show what is scheduled, what has published, and what gaps are coming, then extend the horizon rather than starting over. Every row carries a `Path` column routing it to Canva or to text-only drafting.

**Email rows are always text-only.** Canva is used for social posts only — Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn. No email templates, no autofill, no design copies, no asset uploads, no exports for an email row. Email graphics are out of scope for this skill: Canva email autofill fills unused image slots with stock placeholder graphics, and its preview thumbnails do not render in chat. If the owner asks for a Canva email design, see `reference/gotchas.md` for the redirect.

**Checkpoint 1 — calendar approval.** Present the calendar, then restate the split out loud: how many rows go through Canva, how many are text-only. Catching a wrong date or a miscategorized row here is free. Catching it after generating designs is not.

## Step 3 — Pull the source material

With Shopify connected, product images, titles, descriptions, and prices flow in directly — no manual upload and no retyped price. Read `reference/shopify-assets.md` for the mapping into design fields.

With no Shopify, the source is the brief, the owner's photo folder, or the brand kit in Canva. That is a complete path; it just costs the owner an upload.

Never restate a price, a discount, or an inventory count the connector did not return. A wrong price in a public post is the most expensive error this skill can make.

## Step 4 — Set the generation budget before generating

Canva allows 100 requests a minute, and each design costs roughly five calls once autofill, export, and polling are counted. Without a budget the owner hits quota halfway through with four usable posts and no clear recovery.

Surface the budget and get a yes before any generation starts:

``` Generation budget for this batch: Canva rows: 8 Candidates per row: 3 (default — say "single candidate" for 1) Total designs: 24 API calls (approx): ~120

Canva's limit is 100 requests a minute. This runs about 2-3 minutes, comfortably inside it. Proceed? ```

Above 30 total designs, recommend single-candidate mode up front. Lock whichever value the owner picks for the whole session.

## Step 5 — Inventory every image slot, one slot at a time

For Canva rows only. Read `reference/canva-api.md` for the endpoints. List each image slot in the template individually by name, never rolled up as "product images." A carousel with five slots and one photo silently renders four stock landscapes and looks finished until the owner opens it.

Build a gap table with one row per slot per design, upload any missing photo, poll the upload job to success, and record the returned asset ID. That ID is the only value an autofill image field accepts — a file path, a URL, a job ID, or an empty string all render the placeholder instead.

When the template has more slots than the brief has photos, stop and ask whether to reuse one photo, get more photos, or pick a simpler template. No generation calls until the owner picks.

## Step 6 — Generate one calendar row at a time

Fire the candidates within a row in parallel, then pause 30 seconds before the next row. That caps the burst at roughly 12 designs a minute, about half the ceiling. Do not parallelize rows — the sequential gap is the quota protection.

Poll job status every 3 to 5 seconds. Faster polling burns quota without finishing sooner.

For each candidate: confirm the job succeeded, export to a permanent PNG, and look at the image. A successful job means Canva accepted the request, not that the design is right. Reject stock landscapes, gray rectangles, template-default text, or the wrong product, and regenerate that one candidate — never the whole row.

**Quota back-off.** First rate-limit error in a session: wait 60 se