DottaandPaperclip
12f70d0d4c
## Thinking Path > - Paperclip manages work for AI-agent companies. > - Chat connections deliver provider messages and user answers. > - Slack requires a response within its original three-second deadline. > - Forms and their delivery receipts must survive retries and tenant restarts. > - This change uses the existing connector queue and durable form owners. > - Current authorization, exact receipt checks and normal ACK rules stay in force. > - The tenant can settle useful work while keeping the connection enabled. ## Linked Issues or Issue Description Refs #19019 and #19348. Companion Cloud PR: paperclipai/paperclip-cloud#1250. ## What Changed - Preserve form grants, sessions, encrypted evidence, terminal receipts and company-authorized Retry. - Check initial form enrollment before the provider send. Keep a typed preparation wait only while an exact current enrollment obligation exists. - Refund the attempt only when the claimed attempt and credential lease still match and provider invocation has not started. Possible or accepted sends retain uncertain-delivery custody. An ordinary error with the same text still uses the normal five-attempt limit. - Notify the existing publication worker when normal enrollment commits. Reconstruct pending work from durable state after a lost reply or owner restart. - Page settled history before proving idle safety. Keep unfinished, malformed and foreign receipts visible beyond the first 1,000 rows. - Keep Slack callback, answer, receipt and ACK rules in their provider owners. Support body-bound Cloud idle capabilities when a complete catalog exceeds the header budget. - Add focused regression coverage, an enabled quiet/reactivation recipe and explicit fixture port checks. - Keep SDK evidence tests tied to a normally built reviewed reference, with a separate strict refusal for actual unreviewed CI outputs. ## Verification App head: `6284d6881b5dc38a9ee149bcbde35e69a67dd8ca`, including actual master `dff8bed007e01c32f3826144b893ec80603d1335`. Companion Cloud head: `f83b38187dc7e6b2e219fe865dc16d268cc66fdb`, including actual Cloud master `b1dcc3421a91efffee631a61536cf48f357c22fc`. Cloud #1250 is merged at `1d07d81f23d4627ab7b6dcf49176b4128a2f8f9b` after exact-head passing checks and complete Greptile 5/5. Current exact-head CI typecheck, build, tests and aggregate verification are green; the complete edited Greptile review is 5/5 and all 13 review threads and nested comment pages are resolved. - Both latest enrollment findings were reproduced against the preceding product. The pure readiness control returned no wait for the first enrollment. The real-PostgreSQL control observed a provider call while that enrollment was still staged. - The repaired source passes three whole files: 21 readiness controls, 80 real-PostgreSQL milestone controls and 37 tenant-actor middleware controls. All 138 pass with zero excluded or TODO cases. The SQL case reconstructs the worker through seven waits, preserves the attempt budget, recovers a controlled lost enrollment reply, and commits one provider-port call and one exact grant. Replaying the selected attempt does not duplicate them. Authorization, SDK and enrollment-response ports are controlled in that SQL case. - The same files cover ordinary five-attempt exhaustion, accepted and possible sends, stale ownership, malformed bindings, attention states and current actor restrictions. One synthetic mismatched-binding parameter uses generation 2 against current generation 1; it is not evidence for an older-generation control. - The normal server-package typecheck passes at the measured source. It runs the normal Runner TypeScript, protocol, SDK and declaration prerequisites and all seven main App programs. The separate declaration configuration is also recorded. A worker union-narrowing error was found, fixed with an explicit callable/null branch, and verified by that normal compiler. No cast or test relaxation was used. - The normal merge of current master preserves all 78 owned paths and 15,783 unrelated master entries and modes. The three measured test files and their changed feature paths are unchanged. New upstream DB code adds only the normal nonunique concurrent native-session index and its migration classification. Shared and adapter-utils changes alter unrelated prompt or denial wording. The 138-case proof carries for those unchanged behaviors; it is not reported as a rerun after the merge. The normal Shared/SDK ensure, DB build, adapter-utils build and complete server-package check also pass at the current merged head. Their fresh inventory contains 8,143 outputs; canonical SQL and journal copies match. This build did not apply the new index migration. - Earlier real-PostgreSQL retained-history coverage reproduced the missing proof with 1,005 settled rows. Its repair retains the existing two-second/64-query inspection budget, current endpoint bound and exact owner snapshot. The 46 source-bound controls cover unfinished and invalid tails, exact cross-page action references, Retry, rollback and lost receipt responses. - Earlier enabled quiet/reactivation coverage produced ordinary useful work, kept configuration enabled, accepted fresh signed work plus a duplicate, and produced exactly one second useful reply. Its two App-worker windows lasted at least 30 seconds with zero measured PG writes, connection or outbound activity after settlement. That evidence stays tied to its measured revision. A missing worker EXIT marker limits that earlier proof; parent evidence does not replace it. - Earlier three-second callback, terminal ACK, current-question race and complete body-size controls remain source-bound. The 500-owner/1,000-binding body measured 313,875 bytes with a 618-byte JWT; signature tampering failed closed. - Final managed-provider acceptance now passes all five fresh Node boots: A/A, A/AB, B/A rejection, B/AB recovery, B/B final. Two independently configured, challenged, verified, linked and enrolled Slack identities exercise ACK and retirement debt separately. Normal provider factory/materialization delivers the configuration through a controlled external stack-provider boundary. The registered opening returns HTTP 200 in 21 ms within the original 3-second deadline. Two answers persist, normal ACK is accepted, exact retirement and lost acceptance/GC replies recover, and the original canonical snapshot remains unchanged without duplicate provider sends or submissions. - The separate complete committed-preflight case passes. A committed `update_attempted` response is lost before SDK entry; normal service-owner reconstruction after the original lease/deadline recovers the same useful update and one answer without a second trigger. This reconstructs service owners within one App process; the separate five fresh Node boots cover process restart and managed signing-key rotation. - Assertion-time PG socket reports balance 15 opens/15 closes across the five boots and 5/5 in preflight, peak 2 and zero live sockets or unexpected attempts. Worker terminal EXIT markers were missing and are not replaced by parent EXIT markers. These are domain/recovery and assertion-time connection proofs, not a new whole-worker terminal quiet measurement. All known owners/groups closed; independent SQL audits were empty; only successful fixture databases were removed. Earlier failed fixture databases/logs remain retained. No product guard, deadline or assertion was weakened. Exact runtime source and normal outputs are unchanged by the three test files in the current follow-up, so these source-bound proofs carry without repeating those journeys. - The preceding App CI ran 11,312 support cases: 11,289 passed, three SDK-evidence cases failed, and 20 external cases skipped. Normal CI dependency setup resolved six stale Slack patch-hash references and produced an unreviewed lock. The public SDK proof correctly refused that lock; the tests incorrectly assumed the CI output was a reviewed reference. The three-file test repair keeps the protected lock policy, source/compiler/parser/Zod pins, scanner and redaction rules unchanged. It builds an owned reviewed reference using the existing normal Shared/SDK producers for the positive seal test, while a separate negative requires actual unreviewed-build privacy refusal and no retained SDK bytes. It does not relabel the CI build as certified or admit a new lock hash. - All four whole SDK support files pass locally: public type 30, evidence 16, public-input synchronizer 8 and lock preparation 10, totaling 64 with zero excluded/TODO cases in 28.73 seconds. The genuine fresh reference build/positive seal and separate invalidated-reference privacy refusal passed within their original 120-second bounds. Original installed dependencies, SDK outputs/cache and runtime source stayed unchanged; normal global setup produced only its own Runner JavaScript outputs. PostgreSQL was denied throughout, all four worker markers were observed, and the owned process group/private test root closed. The local canonical-lock negative mutates only its own reference; fresh remote CI also passes the actual resolved-CI-lock branch: all 16 evidence and 30 public-type tests pass, including the genuine reviewed-reference positive and the strict actual-unreviewed-build refusal. The upstream synchronizer file runs its current 10 cases in CI. - The first complete CI attempt on this head also exposed two separate 30-second timeouts: one real reporter-artifact test and the `agent-test-environment` module-loading hook. Full original logs remain preserved. Their exact test, sanitizer and evidence source blobs are unchanged from the preceding head; inspection found no deterministic setup cause. After the original run finished, one retry of only the failed jobs passed on the same synthetic merge `168851e210671ebe97e7a778e8cf891807e80502`: Runner support reports 11,304 passes and 20 external skips; serialized shard 6 reports all 395 passes, including all 67 route bodies. No source, timeout or assertion changed. This proves recovery; the original causes remain unexplained. - The final pre-merge tree audit uses actual master `17136a6c25ef6cb7c816a29140a4c48c2c75fb31` (refreshed after the earlier `85dec046` audit). The expected normal squash preserves all 81 owned paths and 15,816 unrelated master entries and modes. Only OpenAPI has edits from both sides, and its complete content composition preserves the new project route and token help alongside this PR's API entries. The shared inbound selection changes preserve the same candidate set; new concurrent indexes, Native/workspace behavior and shutdown changes remain upstream behavior. The scoped form proof uses process agents and does not qualify the new Native/sandbox branches. The latest question-schema change still accepts the explicit version-1 payload exercised here. The last master delta also changes managed AI/Native credential refresh and writeback; those branches are outside the measured process-agent form paths. Existing 8,143 local outputs remain tied to their measured revision; no new whole-tree output equality or deployed suspension is claimed. - Reproduce the public path with `doc/testing/slack-cloud-qualification.md`, the companion Cloud checkout, Node 24/22 and fresh owned fixture databases. Aggregate local `pnpm -r typecheck`, `pnpm test:run` and `pnpm build` were not rerun as one command set. Current exact-head required CI and the complete Greptile 5/5 review now pass; the full edited summaries and all paginated threads were read. Local worker quiet does not prove deployed host or Neon suspension. Photon and Discord remain separate work; this PR completes the described Slack slice. ## Risks Use compatible App and Cloud readers before transferring custody. Signatures prove authenticity; current authorization and exact ownership still control execution. Preserve old targets, secrets and terminal facts until their normal owners release them. Keep the managed seal identity stable while custody remains. The required Slack adapter patch remains pinned. Upstream's concurrent index uses the normal top-level migration path. ## Model Used OpenAI `gpt-6.1-sol` implemented and tested the changes. A GPT-6-based Codex managing agent reviewed and integrated them. The host does not expose the managing agent's exact model ID or context-window sizes. The agents used code execution and test tools. ## Checklist - [x] I have included a thinking path that traces from project context to this change - [x] I have specified the model used, its version and tool capabilities - [x] I have checked ROADMAP.md and confirmed this PR does not duplicate planned core work - [x] I have searched GitHub for duplicate or related PRs and linked them above - [x] I have linked public related issues or PRs - [x] I have not referenced internal or instance-local Paperclip issues or links - [x] My branch name describes the change and contains no internal Paperclip ticket id - [x] I have run the local tests listed above and they pass - [x] I have added or updated tests where applicable - [x] I have updated relevant documentation - [x] I have considered and documented risks - [x] All Paperclip CI gates are green for the current head - [x] Greptile is 5/5 with no open findings for the current head - [x] I will address all reviewer comments before requesting merge --------- Co-authored-by: Paperclip <noreply@paperclip.ing>
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Paperclip is the app people use to manage AI agents for work.
Open-source orchestration for teams of AI agents.
If OpenClaw is an employee, Paperclip is the company.
Paperclip is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track work and costs from one dashboard. Choose models and harnesses per agent while keeping your team's tasks, skills, permissions, and history in one place.
It looks like a task manager. Under the hood: org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination.
Manage business goals, not pull requests.
| Step | Example | |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Define the goal | "Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR." |
| 02 | Hire the team | CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider. |
| 03 | Approve and run | Review strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard. |
| Works with |
 OpenClaw |
 Claude Code |
 Codex |
 Cursor + Cloud |
 Gemini CLI |
 OpenCode |
 Pi |
 Hermes + Gateway |
 Grok Build |
 Kimi Code |
If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.
Custom processes, HTTP endpoints, and external adapter packages extend the roster. See the adapter overview for setup and capabilities.
Paperclip is right for you if
- ✅ You want to build autonomous AI organizations
- ✅ You coordinate many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal
- ✅ You have 20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals open and lose track of what everyone is doing
- ✅ You want agents running autonomously 24/7, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed
- ✅ You want to monitor costs and enforce budgets
- ✅ You want a process for managing agents that feels like using a task manager
- ✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses from your phone
The four pillars
Four things have to work for an organization of AI agents to actually produce: the tasks, the org, the training, and the infrastructure. Paperclip is built around exactly those four pillars.
| Pillar | Built for | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Agentic Task Manager — Declare intent. Agents work. You verify the output. | Everyone, daily | Tasks, approvals & review gates · proactive agent coworkers · auditable routines & workflows · verify from diffs, screenshots & tests |
| Org Chart for Agents — Roles, permissions & boundaries for humans and agents. | Managers | Mixed human + agent org chart · responsibilities, delegation, specialization · governance: who can do what · scoped secrets & company boundaries · connection permissions & responsible-user identities |
| Agent Employee Training — Design, train & evaluate your AI employees. | Enablers | Skill Studio & shared org-wide skills · evals & saved test runs · active learning loops & quality metrics · performance reviews for agents · saved test inputs · skill version history & restore · reusable team templates |
| Agentic OS — The infrastructure that makes the work run. | IT & platform | Cross-provider runtime: any model, any agent · sandboxing, integrations & MCP servers · SSO, GRC, RBAC & cost controls · data privacy, internal trace collection, compounding data value · personal & shared app connections · run history & opt-in tracing |
Features
🔌 Bring Your Own AgentAny agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired. |
🎯 Goal AlignmentLink tasks and projects to your organization goals. Agents receive the goal context behind their work. |
💓 HeartbeatsAgents wake for assigned work, follow-up messages, or configured schedules. Delegation flows up and down the org chart. |
💰 Cost ControlCompany, agent, and project budgets. Track reported spend, get threshold alerts, and pause work at configured limits. |
🏢 Multi-OrganizationOne deployment, many organizations. Separate tasks, agents, permissions, and activity histories for each. |
🎫 Task ThreadsKeep conversations, plans, blockers, files, and run history attached to the work. Assign tasks to agents or people. |
🛡️ GovernanceConfigure review and approval stages, approve hires, and pause, reassign, or stop work when needed. |
📊 Org ChartHierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents have a boss, a title, and a job description. |
📱 Mobile ReadyMonitor and manage your autonomous businesses from anywhere. |
🔗 Apps & ConnectionsConnect services such as GitHub, Notion, and Railway, or your own MCP server. Set gateway actions to Allowed, Ask first, or Off. |
👥 Shared Agents, Personal AccountsChoose who can use a connection and which agents can access it. Managed GitHub operations can use the account of the person directing the work. |
🧠 Skills & Skill StudioInstall or write shared skills, test them with saved inputs, inspect results, and restore earlier versions. |
📅 Scheduled RoutinesRun recurring work on a schedule or trigger it through an API or webhook. Each run has a task, an owner, and a history. |
📎 Artifacts & FeedbackFind the files and documents agents produce. Preview supported formats and leave comments on specific passages in documents. |
📦 Ready-Made TeamsPreview and install teams with roles, skills, projects, and routines. Choose their runtimes and make the setup your own. |
Experimental Agent Chat and chat/email connectors add conversations with agents in Paperclip and through configured services such as Slack, Discord, Telegram, and AgentMail. Enable the relevant instance settings to try them.
Problems Paperclip solves
| Without Paperclip | With Paperclip |
|---|---|
| ❌ You have 20 Claude Code tabs open and can't track which one does what. On reboot you lose everything. | ✅ Tasks are ticket-based, conversations are threaded, sessions persist across reboots. |
| ❌ You manually gather context from several places to remind your bot what you're actually doing. | ✅ Context flows from the task up through the project and company goals — your agent always knows what to do and why. |
| ❌ Folders of agent configs are disorganized and you're re-inventing task management, communication, and coordination between agents. | ✅ Paperclip gives you org charts, ticketing, delegation, and governance out of the box — so you run a company, not a pile of scripts. |
| ❌ Runaway loops waste hundreds of dollars of tokens and max your quota before you even know what happened. | ✅ Spend tracking, budget alerts, and automatic pauses help you control the cost of ongoing work. |
| ❌ You have recurring jobs (customer support, social, reports) and have to remember to manually kick them off. | ✅ Routines create assigned tasks on a schedule, with outputs and run history you can inspect. |
| ❌ You have an idea, you have to find your repo, fire up Claude Code, keep a tab open, and babysit it. | ✅ Add a task in Paperclip. Your coding agent works on it until it's done. Management reviews their work. |
Why Paperclip is special
Paperclip handles the hard orchestration details correctly.
| Atomic task checkout. | A single assignee and execution locks prevent competing runs from claiming the same task. |
| Persistent work context. | Tasks, comments, and documents stay in Paperclip. Supporting adapters resume saved sessions across runs. |
| Runtime skill injection. | Agents can learn Paperclip workflows and project context at runtime, without retraining. |
| Governance with rollback. | Approval gates are enforced, config changes are revisioned, and bad changes can be rolled back safely. |
| Accountable connections. | Human access, agent eligibility, and gateway action permissions are separate controls. Approve a call once or save a revocable rule. |
| Goal-aware execution. | Linked tasks and projects carry goal ancestry so agents see the "why," not just a title. |
| Portable company templates. | Export/import orgs, agents, and skills with secret scrubbing and collision handling. |
| Organization boundaries. | Company-scoped access checks keep each organization's work, agents, and activity separate within one deployment. |
What's Under the Hood
Paperclip is a full control plane, not a wrapper. Before you build any of this yourself, know that it already exists:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ PAPERCLIP SERVER │
│ │
│ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ │
│ │Identity & │ │ Work & │ │ Heartbeat │ │Governance │ │
│ │ Access │ │ Tasks │ │ Execution │ │& Approvals│ │
│ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ │
│ │ Org Chart │ │Workspaces │ │ Plugins │ │ Budget │ │
│ │ & Agents │ │ & Runtime │ │ │ │ & Costs │ │
│ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐ │
│ │ Routines │ │ Secrets & │ │ Activity │ │ Company │ │
│ │& Schedules│ │ Storage │ │ & Events │ │Portability│ │
│ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
┌─────┴─────┐ ┌─────┴─────┐ ┌─────┴─────┐ ┌─────┴─────┐
│ Claude │ │ Codex │ │ CLI │ │ HTTP/web │
│ Code │ │ │ │ agents │ │ bots │
└───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘
The Systems
|
Identity & Access — Two deployment modes (trusted local or authenticated), human roles and permissions, agent API keys, short-lived run JWTs, company memberships, and invite flows. Responsible-user attribution follows work through delegation and supported managed connections. |
Org Chart & Agents — Agents have roles, titles, reporting lines, permissions, and budgets. Adapter examples match the diagram: Claude Code, Codex, CLI agents such as Cursor/Gemini/bash, HTTP/webhook bots such as OpenClaw, and external adapter plugins. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired. |
|
Work & Task System — Issues carry company/project/goal/parent links, atomic checkout with execution locks, first-class blocker dependencies, comments, documents, attachments, work products, labels, and inbox state. Search across work, review document revisions, and leave anchored feedback. |
Heartbeat Execution — DB-backed wakeup queue with coalescing, budget checks, workspace resolution, secret injection, skill loading, and adapter invocation. Runs produce logs, usage records, and adapter-specific session state. Bounded recovery handles supported failures and surfaces cases that need human action. |
|
Workspaces & Runtime — Project repositories and workspaces, optional isolated execution workspaces (git worktrees, operator branches), and runtime services (dev servers, preview URLs). Sandbox providers extend execution beyond the local host; availability depends on the configured environment and adapter. |
Governance & Approvals — Board approval workflows, execution policies with review/approval stages, decision tracking, budget hard-stops, and agent pause/resume/terminate. Configured task reviews govern completion; connection action approvals govern calls through the tool gateway. |
|
Budget & Cost Control — Token and cost tracking by company, agent, project, goal, issue, provider, and model. Scoped budget policies with warning thresholds and hard stops. Enforcement uses recorded spend; usage reporting and in-flight work can delay a stop. |
Routines & Schedules — Recurring tasks with cron, webhook, and API triggers. Concurrency and catch-up policies. Each routine execution creates a tracked issue and wakes the assigned agent — no manual kick-offs needed. |
|
Plugins — Instance-wide plugin system with out-of-process workers, capability-gated host services, job scheduling, tool exposure, and UI contributions. Extend Paperclip without forking it. |
Secrets & Storage — Company secrets and per-person secret values, encrypted credential storage, local or S3-compatible file storage, attachments, and work products. Secret references supply credentials to authorized runs without copying values into ordinary agent configuration. |
|
Activity & Events — Mutating actions, heartbeat state changes, cost events, approvals, comments, and work products are recorded as durable activity so operators can audit what happened and why. |
Company Portability — Preview, export, and import organization packages with agents, skills, and optional projects, routines, tasks, and attachments. Referenced secret values are omitted; review packages before sharing because plain environment values and local paths can remain. Packages share an operating setup; full-instance recovery uses backups. |
What Paperclip is not
| Not just a chatbot. | Conversations stay attached to tasks, plans, decisions, and outputs. Experimental Agent Chat can hand work off to assigned tasks. |
| Not an agent framework. | We don't tell you how to build agents. We tell you how to run a company made of them. |
| Not just a workflow builder. | Routines operate within an organization, with roles, goals, budgets, and governance. |
| Not a prompt manager. | Agents bring their own prompts, models, and runtimes. Paperclip manages the organization they work in. |
| Not limited to one agent. | Start with one agent and grow into a team with shared skills, delegation, and review. |
| Not only for code review. | Coding and PR review fit alongside research, operations, content, and other work. |
Quickstart
Open source. Self-hosted. No Paperclip account required. Follow the guided quickstart to set up your first agent.
Just ask your agent to install Paperclip
Share the installation guide with your agent.
Or install it yourself
With Node.js 24.11 or newer installed:
npx paperclipai@latest onboard --yes
The CLI runs from npm's cache; your instance configuration and data persist locally.
See the installation guide for managed installs, pinned versions, canary and git-ref installs, updates, rollback, service management, and uninstalling.
For an isolated manual test instance that is already initialized with a CEO
agent, use test-drive. It stays in the foreground, never installs a service
or creates a first task, and opens the browser only after setup succeeds:
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=... npx paperclipai test-drive
OPENAI_API_KEY=... npx paperclipai test-drive --harness codex
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=... npx paperclipai test-drive \
--harness opencode \
--model openrouter/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5
Each run without --data-dir gets a unique, retained temporary directory; its
absolute path is printed at startup. Pass --data-dir to reuse one, or
--no-browser to leave the initialized instance unopened. When invoked from a
linked Git worktree, test-drive also enables task execution in that worktree.
See the test-drive guide for credential and
reuse behavior.
Troubleshooting: private npm registry
.npmrcIf this fails with an
E404forpaperclipai(or similar) and you use a private npm registry (for example GitHub Packages) via a global~/.npmrc,npxmay be resolvingpaperclipaiagainst that private registry instead of the public npm registry.Diagnostic:
npm config get registryWorkaround (cross-platform; force the public npm registry for this command):
npx --registry https://registry.npmjs.org paperclipai@latest onboard --yes
That quickstart path now defaults to trusted local loopback mode for the fastest first run. To start in authenticated/private mode instead, choose a bind preset explicitly:
npx paperclipai@latest onboard --yes --bind lan
# or:
npx paperclipai@latest onboard --yes --bind tailnet
If you already have Paperclip configured, rerunning onboard keeps the existing config in place. Use npx paperclipai configure to edit settings.
Or manually:
git clone https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip.git
cd paperclip
pnpm install
pnpm dev
This starts the UI and API at http://localhost:3100. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.
Requirements: Node.js 24.11+, pnpm 9.15+
Local Claude and Codex subscription sign-in also needs Python 3 and the corresponding provider CLI on the Paperclip host. The Docker image includes them.
Source development also builds the native Paperclip Runner when enabled (the self-hosted default). Install a Rust toolchain, or set PAPERCLIP_RUNNER_BINARY to a compatible prebuilt runner.
FAQ
Q: Is this project maintained or just slop?
A: Paperclip is maintained by the Paperclip team. We've merged over 2,700 pull requests.
Q: What does a typical setup look like?
A: Locally, a single Node.js process manages an embedded Postgres and local file storage. For production, point it at your own Postgres and deploy however you like. Configure projects, agents, and goals — the agents take care of the rest.
For remote access, use authenticated mode with a private-network bind such as Tailscale, or deploy the persistent server with Docker. See deployment modes and the Docker guide.
Q: Can I run multiple companies?
A: Yes. A single deployment can host multiple organizations with company-scoped data and access checks.
Q: How is Paperclip different from agents like OpenClaw or Claude Code?
A: Paperclip uses those agents. It orchestrates them into a company — with org charts, budgets, goals, governance, and accountability.
Q: Why should I use Paperclip instead of just pointing my OpenClaw to Asana or Trello?
A: Agent orchestration has subtleties in how you coordinate who has work checked out, how to maintain sessions, monitoring costs, establishing governance - Paperclip does this for you.
(Bring-your-own-ticket-system is on the Roadmap)
Q: Do agents run continuously?
A: Agents wake for assigned work and follow-up messages. Optional timer heartbeats let them check for work periodically; routines create recurring tasks on their own schedules. You can also connect externally running agents such as OpenClaw. A mention alone does not assign work or wake another agent.
Development
pnpm dev # Full dev (API + UI, watch mode)
pnpm dev:once # Full dev without file watching
pnpm dev:server # Server only
pnpm dev:mobile # Serve prebuilt UI on :3101 for phones/tablets (proxies /api → :3100)
pnpm dev:both # Run `pnpm dev` and `pnpm dev:mobile` together
pnpm build # Build all
pnpm typecheck # Type checking
pnpm test # Cheap default test run (Vitest only)
pnpm test:watch # Vitest watch mode
pnpm test:e2e # Playwright browser suite
pnpm db:generate # Generate DB migration
pnpm db:migrate # Apply migrations
pnpm test does not run Playwright. Browser suites stay separate and are typically run only when working on those flows or in CI.
See doc/DEVELOPING.md for the full development guide.
Roadmap
- ✅ Plugin system (e.g. add a knowledge base, custom tracing, queues, etc)
- ✅ Get OpenClaw / claw-style agent employees
- ✅ companies.sh - import and export entire organizations
- ✅ Easy AGENTS.md configurations
- ✅ Skills Manager, Skill Studio & Skills Store
- ✅ Scheduled Routines
- ✅ Better Budgeting
- ✅ Agent Reviews and Approvals
- ✅ Multiple Human Users
- ✅ Cloud / Sandbox agents (e2b, Cloudflare, Daytona, Modal, Novita, boxd, self-hosted Kubernetes)
- ✅ Artifacts & Work Products
- ✅ Deep Planning (planning mode, revisioned plans, plan approvals)
- ✅ Enforced Outcomes (watchdogs, recovery actions, review gates)
- ✅ MCP Tool Gateway & Apps (governed tool access)
- ✅ Secrets Manager with per-agent access
- ✅ Activity log & action attribution
- ✅ Self-healing runs & automatic recovery
- ✅ Agent evals & feedback
- ✅ Connected Apps
- ✅ Personal & Shared AI Accounts
- ✅ Shared Agents Use Personal GitHub Identities
- ✅ Skill Version History & Restore
- ✅ Document Comments & Revision History
- ✅ Company-Wide Search
- ✅ Multi-Model & Multi-Harness Teams
- 🟡 Memory / Knowledge
- ⚪ MAXIMIZER MODE
- ⚪ Work Queues
- ⚪ Self-Organization
- ⚪ Automatic Organizational Learning
- 🟡 Agent Chat
- 🟡 Cloud deployments
- ⚪ Desktop App
- ⚪ Bring-your-own-ticket-system (Asana / Linear / Jira as on-ramps)
This is the short roadmap preview. See the full roadmap in ROADMAP.md.
Community & Plugins
Find Plugins and more at awesome-paperclip
Observability
Paperclip ships with opt-in OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation for the server (traces only). It activates when OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT is set and supports grpc, http/protobuf, and http/json via the standard OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL env var. @opentelemetry/api is a normal server dependency; the SDK, auto-instrumentation, and exporter packages are optional peer dependencies — install them only if you want tracing. See doc/observability.md for install commands and the full env-var reference.
Paperclip also ships with opt-in Sentry error monitoring for the server and the browser. Set SENTRY_DSN_FRONTEND to activate it for the browser and SENTRY_DSN_BACKEND to activate it for the server — each variable is optional, and the legacy SENTRY_DSN variable still works as a fallback for either component. The supported server SDK version is @sentry/node@10.71.0; it is an optional peer dependency for the server, so install it only if you want error monitoring. The browser SDK, @sentry/browser, is pinned to the same exact version. See doc/observability.md for the install command, the privacy settings, and the full default capture set.
Telemetry
Paperclip collects anonymous usage telemetry to help us understand how the product is used and improve it. No personal information, issue content, prompts, file paths, or secrets are ever collected. Private repository references are hashed with a per-install salt before being sent.
Contributors changing emitted telemetry events should follow the Telemetry Data Contract. For proposed first-party events that are not in the generated contract yet, follow Telemetry Workflow.
Telemetry is enabled by default and can be disabled with any of the following:
| Method | How |
|---|---|
| Environment variable | PAPERCLIP_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 |
| Standard convention | DO_NOT_TRACK=1 |
| CI environments | Automatically disabled when CI=true |
| Config file | Set telemetry.enabled: false in your Paperclip config |
Contributing
We welcome contributions. See the contributing guide for details.
Community
- Discord — Join the community
- Twitter / X — Follow updates and announcements
- GitHub Issues — bugs and feature requests
- GitHub Discussions — ideas and RFC
License
MIT © 2026 Paperclip Labs, Inc
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Open source under MIT. Built for people who want to get work done, not babysit agents.