Safety and publishing behavior

Creating, scheduling, publishing, and deleting are separate operations.

Operation	Effect	Confirmation
drafts export	Reads a draft and produces Markdown	None
drafts create	Creates an unpublished draft	None
drafts update	Updates a draft from Markdown	Interactive or --yes
drafts schedule	Adds a future release time	None
drafts unschedule	Removes a future release time	None
drafts publish	Publishes after a prepublish check	Interactive or --yes
drafts delete	Deletes the draft	Interactive or --yes

drafts publish --no-send publishes without email delivery. Omitting --no-send allows Substack to send the post. Review the draft ID and flags before confirming.

In JSON or noninteractive mode, publish and delete reject the request unless --yes is supplied. API errors redact configured passwords and cookie values before they are printed by the CLI.

Substack’s interfaces are undocumented and may change. Keep a reviewed copy of important source Markdown and verify the selected publication with substack status before any write.

Export never writes to Substack and never overwrites a local file unless --force is supplied. Unsupported editor content is preserved as an opaque marker and listed in JSON output so it cannot disappear unnoticed. Updates refuse to remove or alter those markers unless --allow-unsupported-change --yes explicitly authorizes it.