Why isn't my assistant live yet?

You wrote instructions, clicked Publish, and the assistant is still a draft. This page is about the second, less obvious reason that happens: a safety check runs on every publish for a self-signup account, and unlike the ordinary setup check, it is honest that some of what it finds needs a human, not a setting.

If you have not read Creating your assistant yet, start there — most “why is this a draft” questions are the ordinary Readiness tab (a wrong language, tool wiring), and that page covers it. This one is about what happens after that check passes.

This check only blocks assistants created through self-serve sign-up. If your account was set up for you directly, the same scan still runs, but it only warns — it does not hold your assistant back.

What it actually checks

Every publish runs a short, automatic scan of your instructions text. It looks for three things, and any one of them can block the publish:

Finds	What it means	You can fix this
A live credential — something that reads like an API key, a private key, a bearer token	A prompt is read back to customers over WhatsApp, voice or chat. Anything in it should be treated as public, and a real credential in there is a leak the moment your assistant is live.	Yes — remove it and republish
A pasted contact list — five or more email addresses, phone numbers or card-shaped numbers in one block	Reads like real customer data pasted into a prompt by mistake, rather than your own business’s contact details.	Yes — take it out; facts like this belong in your knowledge base
Nothing published yet	There is no content to check — you have not published instructions at all.	Yes — write and publish something first

A handful of contact details that are plainly your own business’s (your office number, your support email) is fine and does not block anything — the check only escalates once it looks like a list.

What you’ll actually see

If the scan finds a problem, your Readiness tab shows a line starting “publish gate: the safety check found a problem”, followed by what it found. If it has never run yet, or something interrupted it, you will instead see “this assistant has not been checked since its last change” — that resolves on its own the next time you publish or validate; if it does not, contact us.

When it genuinely isn’t you

Not every reason your assistant stays a draft is shown to you in full — two categories of problem are platform wiring rather than anything in your control, and the Readiness tab intentionally does not spell them out (showing you an unfixable technical detail is worse than being upfront that it needs us):

• Tool wiring — the assistant’s underlying tools are not bound correctly.
• Missing or broken prompt templates — the underlying template files behind the archetype you picked are absent or invalid.

You will see a plain count instead — something like “blocked by N platform issue(s)” — with no further detail to act on. If you see this, contact us with your assistant’s name; this is not something to keep clicking Validate over.

Troubleshooting

It says “this assistant has not been checked since its last change”

Publish or run Validate setup again. It re-checks automatically; if the message keeps coming back after that, contact us.

I removed what I thought was flagged and it’s still blocked

The scan re-reads your entire instructions text, not just the part you edited — check the full Readiness message for what remains. A common miss: a real support email or phone number sitting in the Instructions pane (Bots → Open studio) that is fine as one line but reads as a pasted list once other examples are nearby.

It says “N platform issue(s)” with no detail

That is the platform-wiring case above — contact us rather than trying to fix it from the dashboard; there is nothing there for you to click.

My trial assistant is blocked and I don’t know why

Publish gate failures only block accounts created through self-signup, so if you are on a trial and stuck as a draft, it is almost always one of the three checks above. Re-read your instructions text for anything that looks like a credential or a pasted list of real contact details.