The AI Composer

Where it is, and what a run costs

The Composer lives inside the editor. It is a floating pill labelled Compose at the bottom right of the canvas, just above the editor's own corner buttons.

1. 1Open the editor for the page you want to compose.
2. 2If a widget is selected, tap anywhere off it — the pill is hidden while one is selected.
3. 3Tap Compose.

The pill hides itself in two situations, and neither of them is a restriction:

• While a widget is selected — it would sit on top of the inspector.
• While any other editor sheet is open, and while the Composer itself is open.

Beyond that it is not gated on anything. Any plan can open it, a page that has never been saved can open it, and an account with no credits left can open it — running out is answered on a screen of its own rather than by a button you cannot press.

A run costs 1 credit, whether you are building a page from scratch or adding to one, and whether it is your first try or your fifth. There is also a cap on how many runs you may start in a rolling 24 hours — on Novice that cap is two. The full table is further down.

Three screens carry a run, in order:

• The brief — what you want, and what you have. Nothing is spent here.
• The studio — the run itself, about a minute. This is where the credit goes.
• Review — the finished page, before it touches your real one.

The brief: build a page, or add to one

The first screen is titled Compose your page, with the subtitle Fill in what you have. Skip the rest. It is one scrolling screen, not a wizard — there is no Next, no step counter, and you can fill it in any order.

The mode toggle

The first control is a two-segment pill. It decides what happens to the page you already have.

• Build my page — the composer replaces your layout. This is the default.
• Add to my page — your widgets stay exactly where they are, and the composer fills the empty space around them.

Add to my page is locked until the page has been saved at least once. A locked segment stays reachable by keyboard so its explanation can be read; it just does nothing when tapped.

Directly under the pill is a caption stating the consequence of what you have chosen. There are four:

How the free-cell number is worked out

The "room for about N more cells" figure is recalculated as you type, and it comes from four things:

• The composer always works at 4 columns, whatever grid your plan allows.
• Rows come from your plan, capped for the composer at 8, 14, 18 or 24 (see the plan table below).
• It aims to fill about three-quarters of that grid — a composed page is never packed edge to edge.
• Everything already on your page is subtracted.

Below two free cells there is no point running, so Add to my page is blocked and says so.

What's this page for?

The field labelled What's this page for? is the single most important input. A run with nothing else at all — no files, no photos, no links — still works if this is filled in.

It is a four-line text box. The placeholder shows the level of detail that works: A portfolio for my film photography — I shoot weddings in Jakarta and want people to book me.

The limit is 4,000 characters, which is far more than anyone writes. There is no character counter — at 4,000 the field simply stops accepting more.

Seed chips

Under the field is a row of six one-tap starters: Portfolio, Shop, Link in bio, Musician, Restaurant and Resume.

• Tapping one on an empty field starts your text with that word and a full stop.
• Tapping one when you have already written something puts it in front of what you wrote. It never replaces your text.

The four material slots

Below the brief are four collapsible cards — Documents, Photos, Products and Links. Each opens in place. A card with anything in it shows a count. Fill in as many or as few as you like; everything here is optional.

Documents

Documents — A PDF, a resume, a portfolio. These are read once so the composer understands who you are, and then thrown away.

1. 1Open Documents.
2. 2Tap Add a PDF, resume or portfolio. Once a file is on the list the button reads Add another.
3. 3Pick your files. Each one appears with its name, its size, and a remove button.

• Accepted — PDF, Word (.docx), plain text (.txt) and Markdown (.md).
• Up to 3 files. At three, the add button disappears.
• 4MB in total, across all of them together — so three 2MB PDFs are individually fine and collectively too big. The card shows a running total once you have added one.

The card carries a standing promise: Used once to understand your work, then discarded. Never saved to your Files. Documents never reach your storage and never count against your quota.

Photos

Photos — From your Files, or upload. These are the pictures the composer is allowed to place on the page.

1. 1Open Photos.
2. 2Tap the dashed + tile — a screen reader calls it Add photos — to open the media picker.
3. 3Choose your images. They appear as a grid of square thumbnails.
4. 4Tap the ✕ on a thumbnail to drop it.

Up to 40 photos. At 40 the add tile disappears.

After a run, each thumbnail can carry a small badge naming what the composer decided the photo was. It is the cheapest proof that your photos were looked at rather than counted.

A photo the composer could not categorise gets no badge at all. Badges appear when you come back to the brief after a run — the Photos card opens itself in that case, and its caption changes to What we saw in each one.

Products

Products — What you sell. Three tabs, three ways in, all feeding the same list. The Store tab and the paste tab can be used together.

• From my Store — tick the products you want, from your active marketplace listings.
• Paste a list — type or paste them.
• Store URL — point at a shop you run somewhere else.

The Store tab loads your listings when you open it (Reading your Store…), shows each one's title and, where it knows it, a price — Free for free items. If you have nothing listed, it says Nothing listed yet. Paste a list instead, or point us at your shop. Only active listings appear.

The tab itself opens on every plan — what fills it is your marketplace inventory, and listing something for sale needs Élégante or above. The other two tabs need nothing at all.

The paste tab takes one product per line, in this shape:

• Name, price, link — separated by commas or tabs, so three columns pasted straight out of a spreadsheet work.
• Only the name is needed. Linen apron, $54 is a valid line, and so is a line with nothing but a name.
• Up to 200 products. A longer list is cut off at 200 rather than rejected.

The helper text under the box says the same thing: One per line — name, price, link. Only the name is needed.

The Store URL tab is a single address field, up to 500 characters. Its helper text is worth taking literally: We never open it. It's the address the composer is allowed to link to.

Links

Links — Socials, and anywhere else you live. A list of label-and-address pairs.

1. 1Open Links.
2. 2Tap Add a link for a blank row, or Use my connected accounts to pull in the accounts you have already connected.
3. 3Fill in the two fields: a Label and an address.
4. 4Remove a row with its ✕.

• Up to 40 links. At 40 the Add a link button is hidden rather than letting a row you just added vanish silently.
• A label can be up to 60 characters; an address up to 500.
• Importing twice does not duplicate anything — identical addresses are merged.

Use my connected accounts reads Reading… while it works, then reports what happened in one line. The lines you can see are:

• 40 links is the limit — remove one to add another. — you are already at the cap.
• Those are already on the list. — nothing new to add.
• No connected accounts yet — link one in Settings. — nothing connected.
• Couldn't reach your connections. — the request failed. Try again.
• A partial import says how many were added and how many did not fit.

Accounts whose public address cannot be worked out — a Mastodon account with no instance, for instance — are skipped rather than imported as a broken link. A successful full import says nothing; the rows appearing is the confirmation.

Starting the run

The button is pinned to the bottom of the brief. It reads Compose my page in build mode and Add to my page in add mode, and it always carries the price: · 1 credit.

Exactly two things stop a run, and each one says why in a line directly above the button:

"Something to compose from" means at least one of these:

• Anything typed into What's this page for?
• At least one document, or one photo, or one product
• At least one link with an address in it
• A store address

The balance line

Under the button, one line tells you where you stand. It is blank until your balance loads — a slow answer must never read as "you have none". Then it shows one of:

• No credits left — we'll show you the options.
• You've used today's runs. — you still have credits, but you have hit your plan's cap for the last 24 hours.
• Otherwise, how many credits you have left.

What you cannot choose

There is no style, mood, density or accent-colour control anywhere in the Composer. The look of the page is decided from your material — a shop reads as a shop, a portfolio reads as a portfolio. If you want a different look, say so in the brief, or change it in the editor after you keep the page.

The studio: watching it compose

The second screen is titled Composing your page with the subtitle Stay here — it usually takes about a minute. It fills the whole screen at every size.

The phone-shaped frame in the middle is an animation, not a preview. Tiles shimmer in, fill up and slide around, but their positions are not where your widgets will actually land, and nothing in the frame is tappable. The real layout is Review's job.

The six stages

Under the frame is a list of six stages. Every tick you see is a real event arriving — there is no timer, no progress bar and no percentage anywhere on this screen.

Each row carries one of five marks:

• A check — done.
• A spinner — working. Under reduced motion this is a static dot and the ticking list carries the meaning instead.
• A dash with Nothing to do — that stage had no work.
• A warning triangle — your files could not be read, and the page was composed from what you typed instead.
• A small dim dot — not started yet.

Cancel, and exactly when the credit is gone

This is the part worth reading twice. Cancel is at the top right of the studio. It stops the run.

If you were already holding a finished page from an earlier run and this was a retry, Cancel aborts the retry and lands you back on the page you already had. Nothing is thrown away. With nothing to fall back to, it returns you to the brief with your draft intact — and with any photo badges from the read carried forward.

What the screen says about your credit

The Composer states where your credit stands in plain words, and there are only three sentences it can say:

Before the run gets going, no caption is shown under Cancel at all. Its appearance is the signal.

If the run fails outright with nothing to show, the studio is replaced by an error screen: the message, then whichever credit sentence applies, then Try again and Back to brief. Try again on this screen re-reads all your material from scratch — see the note about the two different retries below.

Review: nothing is kept until you keep it

The third screen shows the finished page. It is titled Your page in build mode and New for your page in add mode — deliberately not "added to your page", because at this point nothing has been added to anything.

The subtitle is the first of two load-bearing promises on this screen, and it is measured, not assumed:

The preview

The page is drawn in its real layout, at its real theme, scaled down. It is not a mock-up: it is built the same way the kept page is built, so what you see is what you get — including what your plan's grid does to it.

• Nothing in the preview is tappable. Links do not open, clocks do not tick, countdowns do not run.
• A wide (desktop-shaped) page scrolls sideways inside its frame, the same way the editor's desktop canvas does on a narrow screen.

Tiles in the preview can be marked:

• A solid outline — a new widget. Add mode only.
• A dashed outline with a photo icon — a picture slot you still need to fill.
• A dashed outline with no icon — a tile that came back empty.

What Review tells you about the page

Between the preview and the buttons, Review shows a card for anything you should know. A clean run shows almost none of them. Each one is a fact with a fix.

• That try didn't work — a retry failed while you were still holding a page. It states whether that try cost you a credit, and reassures you that The page below is unchanged — keeping it still works. If the failure was about credits or your daily cap, a button here (Get more credits or See your limits) opens your options over this screen, without throwing the page away.
• A read failure — your files or photos could not be read, so This page was composed straight from what you typed. This card sits above the preview, because it changes what the preview means. It also warns that Trying again reads it fresh — that uses another credit.
• Empty tiles — some tiles came back with nothing on them. They are named here and marked in the preview. Keep the page and write them yourself, or try again.
• Skipped photos — photos that could not be read and so were not used. Re-upload them and try again, or add them by hand afterwards.
• Picture slots — how many slots still need a picture, and which: Keep the page, then tap any of them to pick from your Files.
• Didn't fit — how many widgets your grid held out of how many were composed. When a bigger grid would hold them all, it says which plan has one.
• Left out — widgets dropped because there was not enough in your material to fill them. More detail in the brief is the fix; a bigger grid is not.
• Skipped — widgets the writer did not answer for this run. That is the run's failure, not a judgement on your material, and a retry usually fixes it.
• What it wrote — a list you can expand. Every line on the page, and where it came from: a document (with the page number), your store address, one of your products, what you typed, or written by AI. If nothing was invented, the card says so.

Keep it, try again, adjust, discard

There are four ways off the Review screen. Only one of them keeps what you have already paid for.

Keep it

Keep it is the full-width button at the bottom. It installs the composed page into your editor and closes the Composer. A toast confirms it — Your page is ready for a build, Added to your page for an add — with a line saying how many widgets were placed, and what shifted.

• It is undoable in one tap. Undo history is written before the page is installed.
• Nothing is published. The page is unsaved in your editor until you save it, exactly like any other edit.
• Your grid is re-applied to your plan on the way in, which is why the preview shows it that way too.

Try again · 1 credit

Try again · 1 credit re-runs with the same brief. It reuses the reading of your material rather than reading it again — which makes it faster — but it is a full credit all the same.

• The page you are holding survives the retry. If the retry fails for any reason, including running out of credits, you land back on the page you already own.
• It does not ask you to confirm. One tap spends a credit.
• The Try again on the studio's error screen is a different one: it re-reads all your material from scratch.

Adjust brief

Adjust brief takes you back to the first screen with your draft intact and your photo badges carried over. Because it throws the composed page away, it asks first — a sheet titled Change your brief? whose body reads This page goes away and composing again costs another credit. Keep it first if you want it — you can undo that in one tap and it stays on your page until you save. The buttons are Change brief and Cancel.

Discard this page

The ✕ at the top right discards the composition and closes the Composer. It also asks first — Discard this page?, with the body The credit for this page is already spent, and closing throws it away. Keep it first if there's any chance you want it — it's one tap to undo, and nothing is published until you save. The buttons are Discard and Cancel.

The footer caption

Under the buttons sits the second load-bearing promise of the screen: Keeping it is undoable in one tap. Trying again or adjusting your brief replaces this page. Both halves matter. The first is what makes Keep it a cheap decision; the second is what stops Try again from being one.

Escape, Back and edge-swipe

Credits, plans and the daily cap

Every Composer run costs exactly one credit — build or add, first try or retry. On a paid plan, credits refill when the plan renews. Every account also gets a one-time welcome grant, applied the first time it touches an AI feature.

The daily figure is a rolling 24 hours, not a calendar day. Runs free up through the day as yesterday's fall out of the window — there is no midnight reset to wait for. Plans and limits has the rest of what each plan includes.

When you run out

Running out is answered on a screen of its own, headed You're out of credits when your balance is empty, or That's today's generations when you still have credits but have used your plan's runs for the last 24 hours. It shows what you have left, how many of today's runs you have used, and — if a bigger plan would raise your allowance — what that plan gives you.

Whichever way you got there, the screen ends on the same reassurance: Nothing was spent on this try. Closing it is Not now.

Settings reference

When something goes wrong

On the brief screen

• Can't read a file — its format is not one of PDF, Word, plain text or Markdown.
• Left out a file because that would go over 4MB — the 4MB is a total across every document, not per file. Remove one, or use a smaller version.
• Left out a file because 3 documents is the limit — remove one first.
• Couldn't add a photo, try picking it again — the picture had not finished being filed. Reopen the picker and choose it again.
• Couldn't reach your connections. — importing your connected accounts failed. Try again.

On the studio and review screens

If a failure leaves you unsure whether you were charged, the credit sentence on the error screen is the one to read: No credit was used. means nothing was spent, and Your credit was used. Trying again will use another. means it was.