An AI agent for social media reads context, decides what to post, drafts it, schedules it through a posting API and checks the result.
A workflow follows a fixed path. An agent picks its own next step. Start with a workflow; move to an agent when the job needs judgment.
1. Drafting posts
2. Repurposing a blog post or video
3. Choosing times and filling a queue
4. Weekly performance summaries
Publishing goes out only after approval. For comments and DMs, the agent suggests replies and a person sends them.
1. Instructions
2. Context
3. Narrow tools
4. An approval gate
5. Ground truth: the real delivery status read back
Hand the model a tool that saves drafts, not one that publishes. With PostGate, draft: true keeps a post out of delivery until someone calls publish.
Send an Idempotency-Key header. If a run retries after a timeout, the same key returns the original post instead of a second one.
MCP fits agents in Claude or Claude Code. Function calling fits agents inside your product. n8n fits workflows with one model step.
Instagram allows 100 API-published posts per account in a rolling 24 hours. An agent in a loop can hit that in minutes.
The guide has a copyable draft-only tool definition, the API calls for draft, publish and status, and the failure modes to plan for.
postgate.studio