Plans — Approve and Execute

Gate 1 of the execution flow: review each piece's brief, pick an estimated cost cap, and start the queue that generates every article in the background.

What is it?

The Approve & Execute button (top-right of a draft plan) opens a modal where you decide what runs. You see every piece's title, primary keyword, and estimated cost. You toggle Include/Skip per piece, choose a cost cap, and confirm. On submit the plan flips to Running and a scheduled queue worker starts generating articles one per minute. The first generated piece auto-pauses for your review — that's Gate 2.

When should I use it?

The plan structure is final and you're ready to spend Gemini credits to produce real drafts.
You want to skip a few pieces this run but keep them in the plan for later.
You want a hard cost cap so a misconfigured plan can't burn through credits unattended.

How to use it

Open a plan in Draft status. Before approving, optionally visit the Pieces tab and flip the Research pill on pieces that should search the web for sourced facts before writing (or use Research all). See Deep Research.
Click Approve & Execute. Use the Include checkboxes to skip any pieces you don't want generated this run (skipped pieces show SKIPPED in the Pieces tab).
Review the Estimated cost total at the top — recomputes as you toggle pieces.
Set the Cost cap (defaults to 1.5× the estimate). Tick No cap if you really mean it.
Leave Pause after first piece for review checked (default) — this is the Gate 2 safety net.
Decide on Generate social posts (default on). When on, the queue worker also writes a LinkedIn company post, a LinkedIn personal post, and a Facebook post per piece. Turn it off if you don't need them — saves tokens and shortens generation; you can still write social posts manually in Content Studio later.
Click Approve & generate {N}. The plan flips to Running and the live progress banner appears at the top.

Tips and best practices

First-time on a new account: leave the default cap. You can always click Lift cap later if you hit it.
Don't disable Pause after first piece until you've seen one full output you trust — that one piece is the proof-of-style for the whole plan.
Estimated cost is rough — actual usage records during execution and shows in the live banner.

Gotchas and limits

Approval is one-way for the current run. To re-approve with different options you'd cancel the plan first.
The five HITL gates are: Gate 1 = this modal (per-piece review); Gate 2 = pause after first piece; Gate 3 = cost cap hit; Gate 4 = piece failure pauses the plan; Gate 5 = the red Stop everything kill button.
Approving requires the feature flag — only allowlisted emails see the button.