Shipped today in HeyNews, across three areas: what generated drafts are allowed to do, the Compose screen, and long-running AI work.

Every link in a generated draft is now verified. Links must come from a story the user selected or a reusable link they approved, and unfinished placeholders are caught before saving. On failure we rewrite once; if the second version still fails, nothing saves and the user retries. A failed generation beats a plausible draft with an invented URL.

Drafts keep the user's closing lines. Sign-offs, "hit reply" invitations, and plugs for their other newsletters were getting dropped as boilerplate. They now survive, and their calls to action follow the same link rule.

Paste a link list straight into Compose. Users paste a whole list from a spreadsheet, doc, or Slack thread; HeyNews extracts links, dedupes, previews the additions, then fetches them as one-off stories in paste order. Large lists process in the background, survive navigation, and support per-link retry.

Refine with AI is resumable. The draft locks while a refinement runs, so a manual edit can't race the result. Refresh or leave, and on return Compose restores the work in progress or applies the finished copy as unsaved changes. Failures leave the previous copy intact.

Scheduled drafts use the reader's issue date. A Friday issue prepared Thursday is written with Friday in mind, respecting saved lead time and timezone, including seasonal clock changes. Killed a class of "happy Thursday" bugs.

Compose and navigation got a rework. More space for story selection, the AI Writer picker moved ahead of the workspace, the auto-select action demoted to a shortcut with an Undo, and the sidebar regrouped by publication with saved work under Issues.

Full release notes: roadmap.heynews.co/p/whats-new-july-18-2026-I9hjk0