# FAQ — Heliostat ## Think ### What's the Think workspace? `/think` is a mind-map of your raw ideas — notes with markdown bodies, `[[wikilinks]]` between them, folders, `#tags`, and a small graph view. Bare URLs auto-resolve to their page titles, YouTube links inline-embed, and tasklist checkboxes toggle in place. Each note is its own document; pitches start there. When a cluster of notes feels ready, select them on the canvas and click Extract — Heliostat hands those notes to OpenAI to draft a Pitch you can edit. ### Can I share a single note publicly? Yes, per-note. Flip Share on inside a note's editor and Heliostat mints a `/u//n//` URL — both halves must match for the share to resolve, so revoking sharing invalidates the link instantly. Images and image comments come along; the rest of your map stays private. There's also a one-shot `.tar.gz` export of every note as a `.md` file, folders preserved as directories. ## Shape Up ### Do I have to use 6-week cycles? No. Default is 2 weeks; configurable from 2 to 6. Most solo devs pick 2–4. Anything shorter than 2 weeks and Shape Up stops doing the heavy lifting for you. ### What happens if I don't finish a pitch in the cycle? It gets cut — not pushed, not rolled over. A cut scope moves back to the pitch list as a raw draft with title, problem, solution, rabbit holes, and no-gos preserved. Re-pitch it next cooldown, re-commit next cycle, or let it go. The Retro Coach walks you through why it didn't ship — usually appetite, sometimes a rabbit hole you didn't flag. ## The Senior ### Is the Senior reading my code? No. The Senior reads only what you write — your pitches, scope check-in notes, and retro messages. It never reads source files from your repos. The only GitHub data Heliostat ingests is commit metadata (branch name and message) so it can auto-link commits to the right scope on your hill chart. ### Can I turn off the Senior? Nothing runs against the Senior until you explicitly ask — there's no background critique. On Solo you can author your own personas (different voice, scope, level of pushback) from the Personas page, or pick a preset that's less opinionated. The Retro Coach is a separate surface with the same rule: it only runs when you open the retro. ## Workflow ### What if something urgent happens mid-cycle? Log it as unplanned work. The hill chart keeps ticking; the cycle does not get re-planned. Unmatched commits from the GitHub App are auto-classified as unplanned and grouped by branch, so a hotfix branch reads as one entry, not ten. You'll see total unplanned hours and your interruption percentage in retro and decide whether the appetite was wrong or the urgency was manufactured. ### Can I have more than one project? On Free, a cycle holds one pitch from one project — you're focused on a single bet at a time. On Solo, both go unlimited: unlimited projects, and a cycle can mix pitches from any of them. Pitches live at the user level, so on Solo you can commit pitches from any project into any cycle, and the tag on each scope is what wires commits back. ## Public ### What does the public `/u/` page show? It's an inbound inbox, not a profile. People can send you pitch drafts at `/u/`; you triage them in your Submissions queue and choose what (if anything) to accept. It doesn't publish your cycle, hill chart, commits, or check-ins. Whether the page accepts submissions at all is a setting you control. ## Integrations ### Does Heliostat have an MCP server? Yes. Heliostat exposes an OAuth 2.1 endpoint and a Model Context Protocol server at `/mcp` so an external AI client you trust (Claude, Cursor, your own) can read and modify your pitches, scopes, cycles, lessons, cooldown ideas, and unplanned work on your behalf. Clients register dynamically; you authorize each one from settings and can revoke a client at any time, which immediately invalidates its tokens. ## Billing ### What counts toward my monthly AI quota? All three AI surfaces share one bucket: messages you send to the Senior on the pitch editor, mind-map → pitch extractions you trigger from the graph view, and Retro Coach conversations during cooldown. Free is 10 / month; Solo is 150 / month. The shared bucket resets on the 1st of each calendar month; the meter is visible in the Senior panel, on `/settings`, and inside the retro. ### Do I get a refund if I cancel mid-cycle? Ask via [feedback](/feedback) within 14 days of the charge and we'll refund it — no forms, no retention questions. After that, cancel anytime from the Stripe billing portal and your subscription runs through the end of the paid period. Your data stays on the Free tier either way; Solo-only features just lock again until you upgrade.