Generating & refreshing by hand.
Generate, Regenerate, Refresh signals — three buttons that do genuinely different things. Plus the six phases of the cinematic, and the caps that still apply when you force a scrape.
Your brief lands on its own every morning. But you don't always want to wait — a competitor just did something, or you changed a setting, or you want a second look. Three buttons cover it, and they do genuinely different things.
Three buttons, three jobs
| Button | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Generate today's brief | The empty state, when no brief exists yet | Runs the whole pipeline and produces today's brief on the spot. |
| Regenerate brief | Header, when a brief already exists | Deletes today's brief and rebuilds it. Same pipeline, fresh output. |
| Refresh signals | Header, and at the foot of the brief | Forces a competitor scrape now, instead of waiting for tonight. Doesn't rewrite the brief. |
The distinction that matters: Regenerate rewrites what we already know. Refresh signals goes and finds out more. If your competitors have been quiet all week, regenerating won't conjure activity — refresh the signals first, then regenerate.
Generate today's brief
When you open the Daily Brief before your scheduled hour — or before you've connected a channel — you'll see “No brief yet for today” and a single button.
Press it and the page swaps to a full-screen cinematic while the real pipeline runs. It typically takes 15 to 30 seconds. You can leave the page; the brief is saved server-side whether or not your browser is still watching.
The six phases
The cinematic isn't theatre. Each phase is a real step in the pipeline, and it lights up when that step actually completes.
Scanning your competitors
We check each rival's channels. Subject to the once-a-day scrape cadence — if we already looked today, this phase reuses what we found rather than paying to look again.
Reading the last 24 hours
Pulling the recent signal window and what each competitor has been doing.
Mapping your next moves
The single action, under fifty words.
Drafting your social posts
One per enabled platform, validated against your voice and the platform's rules. Social posts →
A phase can soft-fail. It goes amber and says why — “Couldn't reach every channel — we worked with what we have”, or “No platforms enabled — enable some in Brief Settings” — and the pipeline carries on. A failed phase never kills the brief; you still get everything the other five produced.
If the stream ever stalls, a watchdog closes the cinematic and reloads the page anyway, because the brief is persisted regardless of whether your browser saw the final frame.
Regenerate — it replaces today's
Regenerate deletes today's brief and writes a new one in its place. The old verdict, the old posts, the old blog idea — gone. You don't end up with two briefs for one day, and the version you replaced is not recoverable. If there's a draft in there you want to keep, copy it first.
Regenerate is the right button after you've:
- Added competitors or pasted in missing social handles.
- Changed your platforms or your daily output numbers.
- Trained your voice — this is the big one. New writing samples change every draft.
- Got a brief that reads flat — a bad morning upstream, and a rerun usually fixes it.
If all you changed was a rule for one platform, don't regenerate the whole brief. Use that social card's own Regenerate button — it rewrites just that post, re-reading your saved rule as it goes. Per-platform rules →
Refresh signals
This is the scraper button. It:
- Backfills any social handles it can find on your competitors' homepages.
- Forces a fresh scrape of their social channels and blogs, ahead of the normal 24-hour cadence.
- Reports back plainly: “Scraped — 7 new signals.”
It takes around 30 seconds. It does not rewrite your brief — the new signals appear in the competitor accordion, and you'd regenerate afterwards if you want the Verdict to take them into account.
“Force” lowers the barrier; it doesn't remove it. Two limits still apply, and they exist because scraping costs real money:
A one-hour cooldown per source. Once a rival's LinkedIn has been force-scraped, it can't be force-scraped again for an hour. Clicking the button repeatedly does nothing.
A daily cap per brand. Once a brand has used up its paid scrape runs for the day, the paid sources are skipped until the window rolls — even on a forced refresh. Free sources (YouTube, blog feeds) keep running regardless.
So the honest answer to “why didn't Refresh signals find anything?” is usually: because we already looked, recently, and nothing has changed. The other answer is missing handles. The handles problem →
The limits
- 6 brief generations per minute, per account. Regenerate is a heavy job; this stops an accidental double-click from stacking up runs.
- One brief per brand, per calendar day — in your timezone. Regenerating replaces it; it doesn't add a second.
- Scraping runs once every 24 hours per competitor source, unless you force it.
What it costs
A brief you generate by hand costs exactly the same as one that arrives on schedule: 2 credits per drafted social post, 2 per blog idea, plus any scraping that actually ran.
The useful part: a same-day regenerate doesn't re-charge you for scraping. Because we only check each rival once every 24 hours, a regenerate re-uses the signals already collected — nothing is re-fetched, so nothing is re-billed. You pay for the new drafts, and the scraping line stays at zero.
Regenerate as often as you like within a day. Just remember it replaces what's there. The full cost model →