Field note 04 / Lineups
How Knute sets your ESPN lineup every morning
One pass a day before the slate, plus chat on demand. Fresh data or it skips.
The short answer
Does Knute set my ESPN lineup automatically?
Yes. Knute runs one lineup pass a day before the slate, plus whatever you ask for in chat. It re-syncs your ESPN team, reads injuries, matchups and projections, decides starters inside your league's actual slots, and applies the lineup on ESPN at the autonomy level you set. Stale data means it skips rather than acts.
I built Knute because every AI fantasy tool I tried stopped at a recommendation. The recommendation was never the hard part. Setting the lineup, every day, without being reckless, was.
A note from the founder
The lineup is a chore, and chores are what agents are for.
Fantasy baseball is where this started. A daily league asks you to look at your roster every morning, notice who got scratched, who is facing a lefty, who is on a plane, and move people into the slots before first pitch. Miss a day and you eat a zero. That is the loop Knute was built to own.
What follows is the loop as it exists in the code, not as I would like to describe it on a landing page. Where the product refuses to do something, I say so.
01 / The daily loop
What does Knute do every morning?
One scheduled pass per team, before the day's games. Chat can trigger the same pipeline on demand at any hour.
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01
Re-sync the team
Knute pulls your roster, your league's slots and scoring, and the current scoring period from ESPN before it thinks about anything. It does not decide from yesterday's picture.
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02
Check freshness
The live pass carries a hard bound on how old the roster snapshot may be, measured in minutes. If the re-sync fails and the snapshot is past that bound, the team is skipped and the skip is recorded. No lineup is written from stale data.
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03
Read the day
Injury status, who is actually playing today, the matchup, and projections go into the decision context, alongside your league's scoring settings and any instructions you have given it.
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04
Decide inside the slots
Starters are chosen for the slots your league actually has, checked against each player's slot eligibility. A player who cannot legally occupy a slot is never proposed for it. Healthy players sitting in an IL slot can be activated back to the bench as part of the same lineup transaction.
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Apply at your autonomy level
Advisor proposes and waits. Co-pilot fires routine lineup moves and holds bigger calls for you. Autopilot runs inside the limits you set. The write to ESPN happens only after the same gate that every other move passes through.
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06
Log it
Every applied move, every skip and every held approval shows up in the app. You can see what it did and why it did not do more.
02 / Guardrails
What stops it from doing something dumb?
Locks are honored. A lineup written for today is checked against the snapshot locks, so a player whose game has already started is not moved. If you ask for a lineup for a specific later date, it is composed for that date and written to that scoring period, not silently to today.
One pipeline for everything. The morning pass and a chat instruction like start one player over another end up in the same place: a preview, deterministic eligibility and freshness checks, then a single guarded write path to ESPN. There is no second, looser route for moves you asked for yourself.
A kill switch above the model. Whether any live write happens is decided by a switch chain that sits outside the model's judgment. Turning Knute off in the app is one tap, and it is honored before the write, not after.
Skip, do not guess. When ESPN cannot be reached, the snapshot is too old, or the roster state disagrees with what the decision was made against, the pass records an error for that team and moves on. A missed pass is visible and recoverable; a wrong lineup written from bad data is not.
03 / Cadence by sport
Daily in baseball. What about football?
The scheduled morning pass was built for fantasy baseball, where lineups change every day and the slate is the clock. That is the loop described above.
Fantasy football lineups are weekly by nature, and Knute works on ESPN fantasy football today: it reads your roster, injuries and matchups, and lineup moves go through the same gated pipeline. What I can say from the code is that football lineup work runs through chat on demand, and the daily scheduled pass is a baseball loop. I am not going to describe a weekly football scheduler that I cannot point to.
04 / Boundaries
What Knute does not do
It never makes trades. It does not act on a stale snapshot. It does not move a player past a game lock. It works on ESPN fantasy football and ESPN fantasy baseball only; there is no other platform integration today. It does not run auction drafts. And it does not promise you will win: a correctly set lineup is table stakes, not a guarantee.
05 / Questions
Common questions about lineups
Does Knute actually set my ESPN lineup, or just recommend one?
It sets it, inside the autonomy level you chose. On Advisor it proposes a lineup and waits for your approval. On Co-pilot routine lineup moves fire on their own and bigger calls wait for you. On Autopilot it runs the team inside the limits you set. Every applied move is logged in the app.
How does Knute decide who to start?
It re-syncs your team from ESPN, reads injuries, matchups and projections, and fills the starting slots your league actually has, using your league scoring settings. The decision is bounded by deterministic checks: eligible slots only, ESPN game locks honored, and no move on a roster snapshot that is too old.
What happens if the data is stale?
Knute skips. The live lineup pass refuses to act on a roster snapshot older than a bound measured in minutes. It re-syncs first, and if it still cannot get a fresh picture of your team it records the skip instead of writing a lineup from old data.
Can I tell Knute to start a specific player?
Yes. Ask in chat, for example start one player over another, and the request goes through the same gated pipeline as the morning pass: a preview, the same eligibility and freshness checks, then the write to ESPN. Owner-directed moves do not get a shortcut around the safety checks.
How do I turn it off?
One tap in the app switches the whole thing off. Below that, you can also step a team down to Advisor, where nothing happens on your roster until you approve it.
If you play in an ESPN league and you are tired of being the one who forgets, get Knute on the App Store, connect your team, and start it on Advisor. Move it up when you have watched it work.