How to Know an AI Agent's Draft Is Ready to Publish
An AI agent's draft is ready to publish when it has passed through a defined checkpoint, not when it merely reads well. In our own workflow, that checkpoint is explicit: the draft moves to a review surface, a human marks it up or approves it, and only approved work lands in a library that's safe to ship from.
Why "reads well" isn't the same as "ready"
A fluent draft and a publishable draft are different things. Fluency is something a language model produces reliably. Readiness is a judgement about whether the claims are accurate, the tone matches the brand, the facts are sourced, and the piece won't embarrass anyone six months from now. None of that is visible from the text alone. You need a step where a person with context looks at the draft and makes that call, and you need to be able to point to when that step happened.
This is the difference between "the copy looks fine" and "someone with authority over this brand signed off on it." The first is a vibe. The second is an event you can log.
The checkpoint, concretely
In Orbitable, every agent's output moves into the Dock before anything is treated as final. The Dock is a review surface: whoever is reviewing sees what's waiting, can drop pins directly on the draft to flag specific lines or claims, sends it back to the agent with that feedback, and approves it into a library once it's right. Requests coming into that review queue carry SLA targets, so "ready" also means "reviewed inside the time you said it would be."
That's the gate. A draft that hasn't been through it isn't ready, no matter how polished it looks on screen. A draft that has been through it, marked up if needed, and approved, is ready by definition, because the definition is the process, not a feeling about the prose.
What actually gets checked at that gate
The review step isn't a rubber stamp. It's where a small number of specific things get caught before they go live.
Every agent in the fleet works from one shared world model per customer, the ICP, brand voice, products, competitors, and any uploaded knowledge base. That shared context is what keeps a draft from drifting off-brief in the first place, but it doesn't replace the review step. It just means the reviewer is catching edge cases, not correcting the basics every time.
Who should be the human in the loop
The reviewer doesn't have to be the same person who requested the work. In the Dock, an internal team member and an external client or stakeholder can both sit in that review role, and the two views are kept separate: internal notes are never visible to a client. That matters because "ready to publish" can mean two different things depending on who's asking, ready for the team to see, and ready for the market to see, and those are not the same bar.
A client (or any external stakeholder) sees what's waiting for them, marks it up, sends it back, and approves it into their own library. They can also raise new requests directly from that surface. This is the Dock included on the Agency and Enterprise plans, and available as a $49/mo add-on on Founder and Team. A client-only seat exists specifically for this: someone who needs to review and approve work without needing a full seat in the rest of the platform.
What it costs to check the work
One detail worth being explicit about: reviewing a draft never costs credits. Credits meter the work agents do to produce a draft, research it, write it, revise it. Looking at that draft, marking it up, sending it back, or approving it doesn't touch your credit balance. That's a deliberate design choice, because a review gate only works if nobody is incentivised to skip it to save budget. If checking the work cost the same as producing it, teams would learn to skip the check under time pressure, which defeats the point of having a gate at all.
The gate is the answer, not a checklist
You'll find plenty of general advice online about "checking tone" or "verifying facts" before you publish anything AI produced. That's true but it's not a system, it's a hope. A system is a specific step in the workflow that a draft cannot skip: it goes to review, a specific person looks at it, they either send it back with pins or approve it into a library, and only what's in that library is safe to publish from. If you can't point to that step in your own tooling, you don't have a readiness gate, you have an editor's mood on a given Tuesday.
FAQ
How do you know when an AI agent's draft is actually ready to publish?
It's ready when it has passed through a defined review checkpoint: someone reviewed it, marked it up if it needed changes, and approved it into a library of finished work. If that step hasn't happened, the draft isn't ready regardless of how polished it reads.
Does reviewing an AI-generated draft cost anything?
No. Credits are used for the work agents do to produce and revise a draft, but reviewing, marking up, sending back, or approving that draft never costs credits in Orbitable. This is intentional, so review isn't something teams are tempted to skip to save budget.
Who should approve a draft before it goes live?
Whoever has authority over the brand or the client relationship the content represents. In the Dock, that can be an internal team member or an external client, and their notes stay separate, internal comments are never visible to a client reviewing the same draft.
What's the difference between an internal review and a client review?
An internal review checks accuracy and brand fit before anything reaches the client. A client review, done through the Dock, is where the client themselves sees the draft, pins feedback directly onto it, sends it back if needed, and approves it into their own library, with SLA targets attached to how quickly that happens.
Is the Dock available on every plan?
It's included on the Agency and Enterprise plans. On Founder and Team, it's available as a $49/mo add-on. A Dock-only client seat exists for stakeholders who only need to review and approve, not use the rest of the platform.