One Prompt, One Draft, Eight Social Posts
You have a campaign to get out this week. The same idea has to reach Instagram as a feed image, a carousel and a story, reach Facebook the same three ways, and reach LinkedIn as a post and as a carousel. That is eight posts from one idea, and today most of the afternoon goes on shapes rather than on the idea.
Latent is our post generator, and it is in alpha. It automates major parts of marketing through social media. It does not run the rest of your marketing. Here is the part it takes, and here is where it stops.
Count the operations in one week of posts#
Making a week of posts by hand is not one job. It is a patchwork of design tools that you hold together by hand, and the work inside it is mostly clerical.
Count what a single publication asks of you:
- Design the picture once, in whichever tool you happen to own.
- Re-crop it to a 1:1 square for the Instagram feed.
- Re-crop it again to 4:5 portrait.
- Re-crop it again to 9:16 for the story, where a horizontal composition has nowhere to go.
- Re-crop it again to a wide 1.91:1 for LinkedIn.
- Repeat all of that for every slide of a six-slide carousel.
- Write the caption three times, because every platform counts characters differently and you are counting by eye.
- Write the first comment where you use one.
- Open three tabs, paste, check the shape rendered the way the preview promised, and send.
None of that is the campaign. It is shape management and character counting, and it is the reason a good idea reaches three platforms on Thursday instead of Monday.
Re-cropping is the wrong operation#
A crop removes picture. That is the whole of what it does. Every re-crop of a single master image subtracts from a composition that was framed for a different shape, so by the fourth format you are cutting a logo off the edge of a picture that never had room for it.
Latent runs the operation the other way around. You write one prompt for the publication and reuse it for every run. One press fills every empty image slot in the draft, up to 10 images per run, and Latent generates each image at the shape that slot needs rather than cutting a finished picture down to it.
Four aspect ratios exist: square 1:1, portrait 4:5, story 9:16 and wide 1.91:1. Latent narrows those four to what the platform and the post type accept, and never offers you a shape the platform would reject. There are no model settings and no quality settings to pick through. You write the prompt; the shapes follow from where the post is going.
For a picture you already own and cannot regenerate, there is canvas extension. It adds picture area around the original and keeps every original pixel, so nothing is cropped. That has a stated limit: it works between 1:3 and 3:1 and refuses shape changes more extreme than that. Inside the range Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn use, nothing you shot gets cut.
What one draft holds#
One draft holds one post per platform and post type: Instagram feed, carousel and story; Facebook feed, carousel and story; LinkedIn post and carousel. Eight posts, one publication, one place to look.
Each post keeps its own caption and its own first comment, and each caption field counts live against that platform's own limit while you type. Carousels run 2 to 10 slides, or 2 to 20 on LinkedIn.
One look holds across the publication. You pick a single global style from ten: UGC, Bold type, Minimal, Quiet luxury, Cinematic, Flat lay, Retro, Pastel gradient, Scrapbook and Glass 3D. Every generated image in that publication uses the one you picked, and you can apply it to your own uploads once they sit in a slot.
Ten is the entire list. The styles cannot be edited and you cannot add an eleventh, which is a ceiling if your brand look is nothing like any of them. The lever you do have is reference images: attach up to nine of your own product shots or past generations and generation follows them. A reference steers an image without filling a slot.
Everything draws on one shared image library. Every post and every publication reaches into the same pool of generations and uploads, in PNG, JPEG or WebP up to 25MB, and using an image in a second post does not copy it.
When one part of an image is wrong, you do not regenerate the whole thing. Open the placed image, brush a mask over the part that should change, describe the replacement, and the unpainted area comes back exactly as it was. Chain one edit into the next, or revert to the original.
Text works the same way. One press writes only the blank caption and first-comment fields and leaves the words you already wrote alone. Rewrite a single field in place without disturbing the others.
What the assistant does, and what it will not do#
Rava is Latent's assistant, and it operates the app rather than describing it. It works on the same draft the manual controls edit: it adds platforms, writes captions, starts image and copy generation, reshapes an off-format image, regenerates a placed image and opens the editor. It asks one question at a time and does not re-ask what your earlier messages already answered.
Rava adds. That is the whole of its authority. It cannot delete anything, it cannot disable anything, it cannot set the style, and it cannot publish. Build an entire eight-post publication through conversation and it is still a draft when you stop typing.
A person presses publish. That is a rule at Silverthread Labs rather than a setting inside Latent, and it binds every product we ship. The market is filling up with software that acts in your name while you are not looking. Latent will not, and the assistant is built so that it cannot.
What gets checked before anything goes out#
Submit, and Latent names the problems before anything is sent: a caption over the limit, too few carousel slides, an unconnected account, an image with the wrong shape, an image that no longer exists. A refused submit is not a failure. The draft stays a draft with every problem marked inline where it sits, and you fix five things in one pass instead of finding them one at a time in three platform tabs.
Once it passes, choose how it goes: publish now, schedule a date and time with a timezone, drop it onto the next open slot in your weekly queue, or leave it a draft for as long as you like. The queue is a weekly set of recurring posting times, filled in order. There is one queue per account, so a brand running two separate posting rhythms schedules the second one by hand.
At publish time Latent refits every image to that platform's requirements, and never upscales one. It checks connection state live and re-checks it at submit, so a post is never sent to an expired connection. One account links per platform. LinkedIn posts as yourself. Facebook and Instagram publish to a Page.
Open a publication after it goes out and Latent fetches reach, likes and comments from the platform at that moment, alongside a link to the live post.
Where Latent stops#
Three limits are worth knowing before you decide it fits.
Stories carry images only. No caption, no first comment. If your story strategy depends on text overlays written at publish time, that work stays where it is today.
Latent reads performance numbers live and stores none of them. It shows reach, likes and comments as the platform reports them the moment you open a publication, and it keeps no history and draws no trend line. If you report on month-over-month performance, you keep that record somewhere else.
One account per platform. An agency running six client accounts on Instagram is not the shape this fits.
None of those three is a rounding error, and you should hear all three now rather than after you have moved a client onto it. Latent takes the part of social media marketing that is shape work, character counting and copy-paste, and it takes that part completely.
Latent is in alpha#
Latent is in alpha, and we post with it ourselves. Agencies and brands are who it is built for.
If your week looks like the list at the top of this post, see what Latent does. If it looks close but not quite, tell us what you post and where and we will tell you plainly whether it fits.
