HONEST COMPARISON
Distribution Autopilot vs. writing your own cron jobs
Everyone writes the first version themselves: a cron entry, a prompt, a script that posts. It works for a month. What breaks is not the posting — it is finding out, six weeks later, that a job has been exiting cleanly and doing nothing.
| Dimension | Distribution Autopilot | Your own cron jobs |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first run | An hour, most of it answering the installer's questions | An afternoon, and it genuinely works |
| When a job silently stops | A supervisor reconciles declared against actual daily and raises it | You notice when you happen to look |
| Definition of success | Wrote its declared artifact, or the run is a failure | Exit code 0 |
| Credentials | Held only by the collect layer; scheduled agents read sanitised JSON | Wherever they ended up |
| When a vendor changes | A weekly check flags it and can block your deploy | A buyer tells you |
| Best for | Anyone who has already been burned by a green dashboard | One channel, one job, checked by hand |
THE HONEST VERDICT
Build it yourself if you are automating one channel and will look at it weekly. Past two or three scheduled jobs the question stops being whether they run and becomes whether you would know if they stopped — and that is the part nobody builds for themselves until after it has cost them.
THE KIT IN QUESTION
Distribution Autopilot Kit
Agents that run your site after it's built — and tell you when they didn't.
9 skills · 3 templatesneeds an API key
Runs unattended
View spec
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