PaperClipAI/packages/paperclip-runner/README.md

Paperclip Native Runner

This package is the standalone development boundary for Paperclip's native runner protocol, process supervision, durable transport, provider drivers, and normalized session backends. Rust owns the production runner under runner/; TypeScript provides the control-plane reference, browser SDK, scenario tools, and conformance oracle.

The package includes one coherent set of capabilities: PRP v1 validation and replay, a supervised local runner with a scripted fake harness, durable WebSocket delivery and recovery, qualified Codex, OpenCode, ACPX, Claude Managed, and AWS AgentCore drivers, live session and issue-thread surfaces, a public browser/React SDK, a standalone adapter demo, and a deterministic mock control plane. None of these surfaces imports or starts Paperclip's server, UI, CLI, or production database.

Public package surfaces

• @paperclipai/paperclip-runner — production contracts, clients/backends, PRP validation/replay, canonical catalog/dispatcher, and compatibility check.
• @paperclipai/paperclip-runner/testing — deterministic mocks plus PRP and semantic conformance kits. Tests and external conformance consumers import this explicitly.
• @paperclipai/paperclip-runner/evals — versioned native-attempt metadata, fail-closed package/binary compatibility checks, and explicit runnerd artifact resolution for eval consumers.

The package root has no mock or scenario exports. Generic credential-free matrix orchestration lives in the workspace-private @paperclipai/paperclip-eval-kernel; scenario content and provider-backed eval campaigns remain outside the runtime package. See ADR 0001.

The two conformance surfaces intentionally prove different contracts. The existing runControlPlanePortConformance suite checks narrow PRP run/event persistence. CAPABILITY_HIGH_RISK_SEMANTIC_VECTORS and runSemanticConformanceKit compare normalized tool authorization, state, effects, audit, retries, conflicts, redaction, continuation, and terminal decisions. The production adapter stays App-owned and invokes Paperclip's real route/service authorities; it does not copy those rules into this package.

Quick start

Native provider debug-trace correlation uses an incremental index owned by its transport. Pending event lookups read only newly appended bytes, with a 1 MiB read budget per lookup; they retry until the observed suffix is indexed. Partial records remain pending, and trace replacement or truncation invalidates the index. Closing a transport clears its index. Other active transports cannot evict its progress. Records over 64 KiB are skipped by the correlation index without buffering or parsing their full contents; the original trace file retains them. Do not restore a full synchronous trace scan for each pending event: it blocks event delivery and can leave the board showing an active run after the provider turn has already ended.

The package also builds paperclip-runner-acpx-sidecar. This bounded v2 stdin/stdout bridge admits the pinned Claude and Codex ACPX profiles. It validates the exact model, session identity, tool catalog, structured input, and terminal settlement at the process boundary. Pi remains unavailable.

Native Claude skill assignments travel in the runtime-context snapshot through runnerd to the ACPX sidecar. After acquiring the provider lifetime lease, the host materializes the assigned bundles under the isolated Claude home's skills/ directory before launch. Reopening a provider refreshes that snapshot; project and ambient host settings remain excluded. This path is separate from the legacy claude_local adapter's remote skill staging.

The isolated Claude settings pin both model and availableModels to the user's requested ID. This keeps ACP from replacing an exact ID with a picker alias during selection and verification. Users can keep selecting models from the normal Claude catalog or entering custom IDs; unavailable models still fail at the provider rather than silently falling back.

For ACPX Claude, approve-reads is shown as Allow Paperclip reads. The host intersects the run's public tools with the implementation catalog's read effects and writes exact MCP permission rules into the isolated Claude settings. The paperclip connection is always the runner's authenticated tool bridge; ambient MCP configuration is excluded. Tool hints and provider permission metadata cannot grant access. Unassigned tools, writes, external tools, and provider-native operations do not receive automatic read permission. Protocol completion and task-delivery controls keep their existing separate allowance.

This runtime has no interactive permission handler. An operation that still requires approval stops the turn with approval_required. The server marks the task blocked, exposes the permission action to the operator, and disables automatic retry. The operator must review the operation and the agent's permission setting before retrying. Company access checks still run when each Paperclip tool executes.

Runnerd selects only qualified provider profiles. Claude Managed and AWS AgentCore receive immutable company-profile snapshots with explicit retention, spend, and invocation limits. No provider process receives a Paperclip API credential or unrestricted server environment.

Claude Managed resolves its API key from the company secret bound to the selected profile. AWS AgentCore uses workload identity only; long-lived static AWS access keys are intentionally removed from the runner environment.

The Rust core includes a bounded client for the sidecar protocol. It enforces request identity, event order, frame and queue limits, timeouts, redacted diagnostics, and process-group cleanup. Runnerd selects this package-local transport only through an exact qualified provider descriptor.

Before a later provider adapter consumes a valid sidecar event, the Rust core also requires its optional or mandatory run and turn scope to match the active execution. Process and diagnostic events can remain global. All operational, tool, input, permission, and terminal events require the exact active binding.

A package-local payload boundary decodes events only after that scope check. It validates control identities, terminal status, question sets, and the admitted runtime event types and bounded fields. It redacts diagnostic and retained event values again before they can enter provider state.

Validated ACPX runtime events normalize into the same provider-neutral activity families as the direct Codex transport. Reasoning contents stay private. Tool targets are resolved within the workspace under the provider host's path semantics and receive a versioned sidecar boundary marker before becoming bounded, display-only PRP safe paths. Raw or unmarked provider locations fail closed. URI-scheme and Windows drive-shaped values require a separate sidecar attestation backed by an existing in-workspace entry or, for a not-yet-created edit target, an existing in-workspace parent. This preserves real POSIX colon filenames without treating arbitrary URI text as a path. Windows separators are canonicalized, and consumers must not reinterpret the display value as file-access authority. Operational semantic-result and terminal events remain reserved for the stateful adapter rather than being duplicated.

The ACPX provider reducer preserves that order while it tracks one active turn, bounded assistant text, semantic results, and pending tool or input correlations. Terminal events flush the final assistant message first and clear unresolved turn-scoped requests.

The package-local session bootstrap starts the bounded sidecar transport, verifies the qualified capability handshake and effective model, opens one identity-bound session, and confirms its run attachment. Any failed bootstrap terminates the process; session shutdown preserves persistent provider state. The session can then start one immutable-workspace turn, request interruption, and reduce polled events through the scope-first state boundary. A mismatched command acknowledgement or invalid event terminates the session fail closed. Polled semantic calls pass through the run-scoped authorized tool bridge before they can be returned to a caller. Before a follow-up turn releases settled tool receipts, runner-core suspends and reaps the idle sidecar/provider generation, then resumes the same verified persistent identity in a fresh generation. This prevents a late session-lifetime MCP callback from inheriting the next turn's event authority.

The Rust question-response validator checks the versioned response envelope against the exact persisted question IDs, answer modes, options, required answers, custom-answer policy, and text constraints before provider delivery. Tool results and structured question responses then use two-phase resolution: validate retained identity and schema, require the exact sidecar acknowledgement, and only then clear pending local state. Codex permission requests violate its pinned sidecar policy and terminate the session fail closed. Safe suspension is available only with no active turn or pending request. The sidecar must return the exact persistent session identity before runnerd terminates the local process. Already validated ACPX reducer events project into provider-neutral durable events only with an exact run, session, turn, and item binding. Raw sidecar envelopes and permission requests are not admitted at this boundary. A safely suspended session can be recorded as a bounded private checkpoint. The checkpoint binds the exact provider identity, run, catalog revision, and catalog digest and is replaced atomically before a later recovery attempt. Recovery releases the stored identity only after those bindings match the prospective session configuration exactly.

Run the complete contract gate with:

pnpm install --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner --lockfile=false --offline --ignore-scripts --dev
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner verify

The verification command requires a stable Rust toolchain with cargo on PATH, in addition to Node.js 24.11+ and pnpm 9+.

Minimal Debian/Ubuntu hosts without root access can extract the required Playwright browser libraries into a user-owned cache and run the same acceptance sequence with:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner verify:rootless

The tracer's final line is stable:

{
  "schemaVersion": "paperclip.runner.conformance.output.v1",
  "runIdentity": {
    "runId": "run_conformance_0001",
    "sessionId": "session_conformance_0001"
  },
  "result": {
    "status": "succeeded",
    "summary": "Standalone Conformance fixture accepted."
  }
}

Run only the tracer with:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:conformance

Replay the Replay happy path, run a Local session, or open the browser devtool:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner replay:fixture
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:local-runner -- --scenario happy-path
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:codex
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner demo:live-console -- --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4174

# Live console: chat with a live session in the browser.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner console:live-console
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner browser:dev --host 127.0.0.1 --port 4179

# SDK: open the public-SDK reference console and mini consumer.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner console:sdk

# Standalone: run the standalone legacy/native/kill-switch tracer and page.
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:standalone
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:standalone -- --feature-flag enabled
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner trace:standalone -- --feature-flag enabled --kill-switch enabled
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner demo:standalone

Live console provider-backed routes are loopback-only and reject wildcard/LAN binds. Browser mutations require same-origin Fetch Metadata, matching Origin, and JSON content; see the protocol-server tutorial for direct curl examples.

Direct live protocol qualification

The canonical direct live protocol suite lives in the separate paperclip-evals repository under evals/paperclip-runner/. Its live-mini.json roster is the complete 35-case Codex qualification lane. Build this package's TypeScript output, release paperclip-runnerd, package tarball, and dist-issue-thread viewer, then use the roster runner documented in that repository. The package ships the required orchestration entry point as paperclip-runner-eval-session (dist/cli/eval-session.js). Evalbook owns the consistent HTML matrix and read-only attempt drill-down pages.

The hosted full-campaign workflow, parallel matrix, credential boundaries, canonical report merge, and versioned S3 index are documented in docs/runner-protocol-live-evals.md.

This direct protocol qualification is separate from the stress-derived Runner workflow schedule below and from the full-stack browser model E2E suite.

Stress-derived workflow, chaos, and AWS AgentCore operations

The deterministic workflow scorer and the chaos schedule do not require provider credentials:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner test:runner-workflow-evals
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner report:runner-chaos-evals

report:runner-live-evals is a paid, provider-backed command. Native Codex requires OPENAI_API_KEY; ACPX Claude requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY; OpenCode candidates require OPENROUTER_API_KEY. The live matrix admits no Pi profile and does not persist credential values. Set PAPERCLIP_EVAL_MAX_CAMPAIGN_COST_USD to a positive finite number to bound additional scheduling after the observed campaign total reaches that value:

PAPERCLIP_EVAL_MAX_CAMPAIGN_COST_USD=12 \
  PAPERCLIP_EVALS_ROOT=/path/to/paperclip-evals \
  pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner report:runner-live-evals

# Run two scheduled native Codex executions only.
PAPERCLIP_EVALS_ROOT=/path/to/paperclip-evals \
  pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner report:runner-live-evals -- \
  --candidate codex-luna --limit 2

GitHub-hosted live campaigns additionally require the default branch, an allowlisted numeric actor ID, the protected runner-e2e-paid environment, and an explicit repository variable before scheduled runs are enabled. Manual dispatches accept the same candidate, case, and execution-limit selectors. The paid job uses the reviewed RunsOn Fleet label when RUNNER_E2E_AWS_ENABLED=true and otherwise stays on ubuntu-latest. Uploaded reports contain redacted observations and trace digests, not raw provider frames, prompts, credentials, tool arguments, or hidden reasoning.

The AgentCore proof-of-concept uses an AWS CLI v2 profile to provision a dedicated invocation role and scoped resources. Its local mode-0600 metadata file contains no access keys; probes assume short-lived STS credentials and clear them after use. Validate locally, provision or inspect the stack, run the bounded lab/smoke, and tear it down explicitly with:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner test:aws-agentcore-provisioning
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:provision -- --dry-run
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:provision
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:probe
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:lab
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner smoke:capability:aws-agentcore
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:destroy -- --yes

To admit the hosted direct-eval workflow, provision with the account-local GitHub Actions OIDC provider and keep the default exact repository and protected environment binding:

pnpm --filter @paperclipai/paperclip-runner aws-agentcore:provision -- \
  --aws-profile paperclip-dev \
  --github-oidc-provider-arn arn:aws:iam::<account-id>:oidc-provider/token.actions.githubusercontent.com

This adds only repo:paperclipai/paperclip:environment:runner-e2e-paid as a web-identity subject on the scoped invocation role. The generated nonsecret profile records that role as both the local invocation role and the hosted execution role.

Provisioning can incur Bedrock, AgentCore Runtime/Memory, storage, and private networking charges. Provisioning refuses to modify a colliding stack unless its Paperclip ownership tags and template description match. A verified ROLLBACK_COMPLETE stack still requires --replace-failed-stack plus an interactive confirmation (or --yes) before it can be deleted and recreated. Destruction requires --yes and refuses to remove a stack with an active recorded lab unless --force is also supplied.

Package-owned commands

Command	Purpose
build	Compile the TypeScript public surface, Rust workspace, and browser devtool.
typecheck	Check TypeScript, Rust, generated schema sources, and browser types.
test	Run Rust/TypeScript fixture, supervisor, fake-driver, live/replay, and boundary tests.
check:forbidden-imports	Reject TypeScript imports and Cargo path dependencies that cross into Paperclip core.
check:tracked-imports	Reject tracked imports and package.json entry points that only resolve against untracked files, so a clean checkout of any commit builds.
check:numbered-milestones	Reject numbered construction-milestone names in tracked package paths and source.
check:package-boundaries	Enforce the acyclic runtime/testing/eval dependency and manifest boundary.
check:clean-consumers	Pack the runner and install its root, evals, and testing exports in a clean consumer.
test:eval-slice	Run the credential-free eval bundle, scoring, and behavior/fault slice.
test:runner-workflow-evals	Run the deterministic provider-neutral workflow matrix.
report:runner-workflow-evals	Validate deterministic fail-closed results and write JSON, Markdown, JUnit, and GitHub-safe reports.
report:runner-live-evals	Execute the paid provider schedule and render its immutable attempts with the canonical paperclip-evals HTML grid.
report:runner-chaos-evals	Write the credential-free eight-scenario chaos schedule.
test:aws-agentcore-provisioning	Validate the AgentCore template and wrapper safety contracts without provisioning.
aws-agentcore:provision / probe / lab / destroy	Manage the scoped AgentCore proof-of-concept lifecycle.
smoke:capability:aws-agentcore	Exercise the qualified AgentCore profile through the capability harness.
check:conformance-parity	Require byte-for-byte equivalent Rust and TypeScript tracer output.
check:replay-goldens	Require all reducer snapshots and cross-language summaries to match checked goldens.
check:replay-parity	Run TypeScript and Rust against the same Replay fixture summaries.
check:browser-tokens	Reject component-local visual literals and require the standalone token layer.
docs:validate	Validate local documentation links.
trace:conformance	Run the Rust mock-core tracer, print the stable result, and exit.
trace:conformance:typescript	Run the TypeScript reference tracer directly.
replay:fixture	Validate and reduce a fixture to a final snapshot.
trace:local-runner	Run one native local session through the Rust runner and fake harness.
trace:codex	Run the mock core with a real, local skillless Codex app-server session.
demo:live-console	Start the package-local HTTP/SSE server with server-only Codex authentication.
console:live-console	Start the standalone browser devtool with the Live console on 127.0.0.1:4180.
console:sdk	Start the public-SDK reference console and mini consumer on 127.0.0.1:4181.
test:sdk	Run targeted browser-client, reducer-projection, and React component contract tests.
test:browser:sdk	Exercise both consumers with the fake driver, keyboard/a11y checks, reconnect/replay, measurements, and screenshots.
record:sdk:codex	Run both public consumers against a safe real Codex session and capture live screenshots.
check:capability-contract	Verify the generated capability, legacy MCP, and eval traceability contract.
check:semantic-contracts	Verify the provider-neutral semantic tool contract is current.
trace:live-runner	Run the real runnerd/Codex semantic loop against the mock control plane.
demo:scenarios	Start the Capability scenario explorer over the mock control plane on 127.0.0.1:4183.
console:issue-thread	Start the Paperclip-style issue thread on 127.0.0.1:4184.
test:scenarios	Run the scenario index, run-artifact, parity, explorer component, and route tests.
test:browser:scenarios	Exercise both the scenario explorer and issue-thread browser contracts.
browser:dev	Start the standalone live/replay browser devtool.
test:browser	Exercise static replay and live scenarios, then capture temporary screenshots under ignored test output.
verify	Run the complete deterministic Conformance through SDK acceptance sequence.
verify:rootless	Extract Debian/Ubuntu browser libraries without root, then run verify.

Navigate

• Architecture and dependency boundary
• ADR 0001: runner and testing package boundaries
• Tutorial index
• Conformance hand-run tutorial
• Replay hand-run tutorial
• Local runner hand-run tutorial
• Local protocol reference
• Durable transport reference
• Codex skillless Codex tutorial
• Codex skillless Codex driver reference
• Live console protocol/server tutorial
• Live console protocol/server reference
• Live console tutorial
• Live console reference
• SDK console tutorial
• SDK browser SDK reference
• SDK component decision record
• Capability semantic catalog and authorization
• Capability live runnerd/Codex loop
• Capability issue-thread UI
• PRP compatibility/versioning policy
• Adding a harness and permission-mode requirements
• PRP v1 expressiveness audit
• Cumulative end-to-end tutorial

Codex adds the package-local real-model reference driver, Live console adds the package-local browser console, and SDK extracts a reusable public SDK plus two standalone consumers. Runtime production Paperclip integration remains deferred; the App-owned production conformance adapter is test-only.

The SDK reference console opens in direct chat mode. Enter a normal prompt, then open the protocol inspector to review events and reducer state. Expand a Terminal row and its nested Debug details disclosure to inspect every canonical event retained for that command. The header marker 🖇️ v0.1.2 identifies the current console iteration.