Substack Draft Status

Substack Draft Status

Reconciles two sources of "what drafts do I have":

• Local workspaces under ~/.mph-substack-cache/<slug>/ (rendered images + post.md)
• Server drafts at https://mphinance.substack.com/api/v1/drafts

The "did I save that yesterday" anxiety usually means: a local workspace exists but it never got pushed. This skill makes that visible in 5 seconds.

When to invoke

• User asks "did I save that draft" / "is that on substack" / "what drafts do I have"
• User mentions a recent post by date or topic and wants to confirm its state
• Before forging a new substack post, sanity-check that an older one isn't sitting half-pushed

Flow

1. Run the worker:

   python ~/.claude/skills/substack-draft-status/scripts/status.py
   

2. The script reads SUBSTACK_SID from C:\Users\mphan\OneDrive\Documents\GitHub\mphinance\secrets.env (or the SUBSTACK_SID env var) and hits GET /api/v1/drafts?limit=20.
3. It walks ~/.mph-substack-cache/ and matches each workspace against server drafts by date-prefix and title.
4. Output is grouped:
   • Pushed — local workspace AND matching server draft (shows edit URL)
   • Server-only — draft on substack with no local workspace (created via web)
   • Local-only fresh — workspace exists, no server match, post.md mtime within 3 days
   • Local-only STALE — workspace exists, no server match, post.md mtime older than 3 days. These are the "forgotten" drafts.
5. Surface the table verbatim to the user. If any STALE entries exist, offer to push them via mph-substack-publish (do not push automatically).

Hard rules

• Read-only. Never call POST /api/v1/drafts/.../publish. Never modify local workspaces. Publishing is mph-substack-publish's job and requires explicit confirmation there.
• Reuse the existing secrets.env auth pattern from create_draft_from_md.py. Do not invent a new auth flow.
• Do not commit ~/.mph-substack-cache/ contents to git. Those workspaces are local-only by user policy.
• If SUBSTACK_SID is missing, print a clear error pointing at secrets.env and exit 2. Do not try to interactively prompt for credentials.
• Stale threshold = 3 days. If user wants a different threshold, pass --stale-days N.

Out of scope

• Pushing, publishing, or editing drafts (use mph-substack-publish for the push)
• Listing published posts (the API endpoint is different and not interesting for the "did I save it" problem)
• Multi-publication support (only mphinance.substack.com)
• Anything that requires network calls beyond the single GET to /api/v1/drafts