Nicky LeachandPaperclip 313fb265db feat(plugins): invalidate runtimes when connector access changes (#16605)
## Thinking Path

> - Paperclip is the open source app people use to manage AI agents for
work.
> - Runtime preparation depends on access and credential state as well
as tool definitions.
> - Grant, membership, secret, and endpoint changes need committed
invalidation.
> - Their writers must acquire locks before journal fanout can lock
agent rows.
> - This pull request adds access hooks with the corresponding
transaction guards.
> - Plugins can refresh preparation immediately while task-time
authorization remains authoritative.

## Linked Issues or Issue Description

**What happened?**

Grant changes, credential rotation and revocation, company access
changes, and connector endpoint configuration do not request runtime
synchronization. Journal fanout exposes lock inversions between
credential persistence, access cleanup, and connection assignment
writers.

**Expected behavior**

Committed access changes request runtime preparation without polling or
credential values in the journal. Agent-specific secret bindings and new
personal delegations affect their target agent. Company access changes
remain conservative. Provider bookkeeping does not create preparation
work.

**Steps to reproduce**

1. Change an audience, delegation, membership permission, referenced
credential, vault configuration, or endpoint instruction.
2. Expect a committed runtime event in the correct company and scope.
3. Run reconnect, credential refresh, SSH setup, or membership cleanup
concurrently with related writes.
4. Expect both operations to preserve access checks and finish without a
lock-order cycle.

**Additional context**

Final feature extraction from #16503. The earlier slices, #16604, and
the separate delivery-test correction #16871 are merged. This PR is now
the active change against master. The rebase preserves the merged
assignment and definition recipient rules, Unicode selector semantics,
and profile/reference transaction guards.

## What Changed

- Add migration 0356 for grants, audiences, delegation,
membership/permissions, secret bindings, referenced credentials and
vaults, and chat/email endpoint configuration.
- Keep events content-free. Ignore health, delivery, publication, Vercel
verification, and GitHub webhook bookkeeping while retaining credential
and repository-access changes.
- Target agent secret bindings and all personal delegation changes to
their old and new target agents. Coalesce delegation changes per
transaction.
- Lock existing grants before connections and credential persistence in
OAuth and cleanup writers.
- Reject superseded refresh leases before rotating stored credentials.
Ignore lease acquisition and release when access metadata is unchanged.
- Serialize audience replacement, validate membership, and preserve
unchanged audiences.
- Lock membership before permission-only saves and grant before Railway
SSH setup. Individual delegation revocation locks its grant and target.
Whole-grant and membership cleanup lock company recipients before
deleting scoped delegations.
- Lock grants and connection inputs before static-key reconnect writes.
Lock company agents before cascading secret deletion; use a nonblocking
secret lock and bounded retries to avoid a new cycle with credential
writers.
- Add PostgreSQL concurrency coverage for access writers and endpoint
publication/configuration behavior.
- Preserve the owner lock for plugin instance-secret removal; these
secrets cannot use ordinary bindings.
- Align Slack search refresh, callbacks, and disconnect with
grant-before-connection locking. Recheck newly discovered grants without
waiting before provider work.
- Retry complete membership transactions when a credential deletion
candidate is busy. Cover all four cleanup entry points and process
company access in ID order.
- Document final invalidation coverage and task-time authorization
boundaries.

## Verification

- Current head: `78aace55bef7f52bc5742b131e0b3961eb5c0f11`. All 1,061
tests across 23 affected suites pass. The named Slack authorization
integration scenario also passes; it exercises authorization, refresh,
disconnect, and rejection of a late callback. Server/database
typechecks, migration safety and numbering, five-snapshot retention,
feature maps, and diff checks pass. The complete PR diff was reviewed
for secrets and personal data before push. Final acceptance: [CI run
39308303837, attempt
2](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/actions/runs/39308303837) is
green, with 55 successful checks and two optional Storybook skips. The
current-head Greptile reassessment returned **Apex 5/5** at 19:16 UTC on
2026-10-19. Its full summary reports no actionable issues. Security
passed, all threads are resolved, and GitHub reports no merge conflicts.
The reassessment was requested as a standard review after the fixes;
Greptile retained the Apex tier.
- On this head, [CI run
39308303837](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/actions/runs/39308303837)
failed the unchanged adapter-utils HTTP/2 fixture with `EADDRINUSE`
before READY. Its closed probe left a port handoff race. That test and
its gateway are byte-identical on master. No upstream fix was found. The
deterministic fixture correction is isolated in #16888; no adapter test
changes are included here. The failed jobs recovered on retry without a
feature source change. The original failure remains documented here, and
#16888 carries the fixture correction separately. That retry
demonstrates recovery; the held-probe negative control establishes the
port handoff race.
- Rebased onto master `194fc11406`, including merged #16604 and #16871.
Replayed only the access-hook commit. Resolved OAuth, test, and
documentation conflicts while retaining both sets of tests. Migration
0356 preserves the merged assignment/definition recipient rules, Unicode
selector semantics, and profile/reference guards.
- Apex returned 3/5 on `0fb65bc27`. Negative controls reproduce its
Slack delegation and member-cleanup deadlocks (`40P01`) and unwanted
Vercel/GitHub bookkeeping events. Slack grant writers now take their
locks before the connection. A separate late-grant control reproduces
`40P01` without the post-lock recheck; the complete guard passes. All
four membership cleanup commands retry from a fresh transaction when the
credential is busy. Tests verify successful cleanup and no journal rows
from failed attempts. Credential IDs and repository-access changes still
notify runtimes.
- Earlier review corrections remain covered: static-key reconnect and
cascading secret removal each reproduce `40P01` without their guards.
Grant lease acquisition/release is ignored. Secret removal releases
agent locks when a credential writer is busy. Instance-secret removal
retains the owner lock and passes its public plugin API contention
regression. Delegation updates and revocations target old/new agents;
unrelated-peer, coalescing, unchanged-update, and rollback cases pass.
Three negative controls verify the required whole-grant and membership
cleanup guards after narrowing delegation scope.
- Preserve prior acceptance failures: the first rebased 20-suite run
passed 1,025/1,026; its only failure was a draft uninstall fixture
blocking a random peer. Blocking the assigned agent corrected that
assumption, and all 44 access/assignment tests passed. Later, all 1,044
tests across 21 suites, [CI run
39302185527](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/actions/runs/39302185527),
standard Greptile 5/5, and security passed on `0fb65bc27`. That did not
clear the later Apex findings described above. Draft run 38975428081
failed a server shard; its cause was not re-investigated. A later green
run does not establish that earlier cause.
- Local fixture corrections are recorded separately from product
failures: an assignment filename filter initially matched no file; the
actual suite was included in full runs. A delegation fixture omitted its
required creator, and a guard run omitted a query import. The new
global-access cleanup fixture now uses its own user to avoid earlier
fixtures' memberships. All were corrected before publishing their final
iterations.
- Local checks target affected services and real PostgreSQL boundaries.
A full local build and repository-wide test run were not performed.
Hosted CI supplies broader verification. Provider responses in tests are
controlled; live provider behavior was not qualified.

## Risks

Migration 0356 adds triggers without changing table schema. Apply it
through the normal migration flow. Most access changes retain
synchronous company-wide invalidation. Company fanout takes O(eligible
company agents) locks and journal rows, without a fanout ceiling or
mutation quota. Agent secret bindings and individual delegation changes
retain narrower recipients. Events contain no credentials.

Physical removal of non-instance secrets takes ordered locks on all
company agents before cascading into bindings. This costs O(company
agents) locks even for an otherwise unreferenced secret. Instance
secrets cannot use ordinary bindings and retain their owner lock. A busy
secret lock releases the transaction guards and retries up to three
times. Continued contention returns a retryable conflict. Provider
deletion stays outside that transaction; a retry resumes removal of an
already disabled secret.

Membership cleanup uses nonblocking credential guards and retries the
full membership transaction. Slack search adds two grant queries, scoped
to the subject and connection. Its retries occur before provider work or
credential persistence. Each retry loop is limited to three attempts.
Invalidation requests preparation; task-time authorization and provider
session activation remain authoritative. Provider calls use fixtures; no
live provider qualification is claimed.

## Model Used

OpenAI Codex, GPT-6, with reasoning, repository inspection, code
execution, and testing. The exact deployment model ID and context window
are not exposed in this session.

## Checklist

- [x] I have included a thinking path that traces from project context
to this change
- [x] I have specified the model used (with version and capability
details)
- [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 either (a) linked existing issues with `Fixes: #` / `Closes
#` / `Refs #` OR (b) described the issue in-PR following the relevant
issue template
- [x] I have not referenced internal/instance-local Paperclip issues or
links (only public GitHub `#NNN` / `github.com/paperclipai/paperclip`
URLs)
- [x] My branch name describes the change (e.g. `docs/...`, `fix/...`)
and contains no internal Paperclip ticket id or instance-derived details
- [x] I have run tests locally and they pass
- [x] I have added or updated tests where applicable
- [x] I have updated relevant documentation to reflect my changes
- [x] I have considered and documented any risks above
- [x] All Paperclip CI gates are green
- [x] Greptile is 5/5 with no open P2s, recommendations, or follow-ups
- [x] I will address all Greptile and reviewer comments before
requesting merge

---------

Co-authored-by: Paperclip <noreply@paperclip.ing>
2026-10-19 12:49:11 -07:00
2026-03-07 02:57:28 +09:00

Paperclip is the app people use to manage AI agents for work.

Quickstart · Docs · GitHub · Discord · Twitter · Website

MIT License Stars Discord Security posture verified by Superagent

Star History Rank


Sign up for the Paperclip Cloud waitlist →


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
OpenClaw
Claude Code
Claude Code
Codex
Codex
Cursor and Cursor Cloud
Cursor
+ Cloud
Gemini CLI
Gemini CLI
OpenCode
OpenCode
Pi
Pi
Hermes and Hermes Gateway
Hermes
+ Gateway
Grok Build
Grok Build
Kimi Code
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.

The four pillars of Paperclip
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 Agent

Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

🎯 Goal Alignment

Link tasks and projects to your organization goals. Agents receive the goal context behind their work.

💓 Heartbeats

Agents wake for assigned work, follow-up messages, or configured schedules. Delegation flows up and down the org chart.

💰 Cost Control

Company, agent, and project budgets. Track reported spend, get threshold alerts, and pause work at configured limits.

🏢 Multi-Organization

One deployment, many organizations. Separate tasks, agents, permissions, and activity histories for each.

🎫 Task Threads

Keep conversations, plans, blockers, files, and run history attached to the work. Assign tasks to agents or people.

🛡️ Governance

Configure review and approval stages, approve hires, and pause, reassign, or stop work when needed.

📊 Org Chart

Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents have a boss, a title, and a job description.

📱 Mobile Ready

Monitor and manage your autonomous businesses from anywhere.

🔗 Apps & Connections

Connect services such as GitHub, Notion, and Railway, or your own MCP server. Set gateway actions to Allowed, Ask first, or Off.

👥 Shared Agents, Personal Accounts

Choose 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 Studio

Install or write shared skills, test them with saved inputs, inspect results, and restore earlier versions.

📅 Scheduled Routines

Run recurring work on a schedule or trigger it through an API or webhook. Each run has a task, an owner, and a history.

📎 Artifacts & Feedback

Find the files and documents agents produce. Preview supported formats and leave comments on specific passages in documents.

📦 Ready-Made Teams

Preview 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 .npmrc

If this fails with an E404 for paperclipai (or similar) and you use a private npm registry (for example GitHub Packages) via a global ~/.npmrc, npx may be resolving paperclipai against that private registry instead of the public npm registry.

Diagnostic:

npm config get registry

Workaround (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, 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.

We're hiring


Community


License

MIT © 2026 Paperclip Labs, Inc

Star History

Star History Chart

Open source under MIT. Built for people who want to get work done, not babysit agents.

S
Description
No description provided
Readme MIT
2 GiB
0 Stars 1 Watchers 0 Forks
Languages
TypeScript 92.4%
JavaScript 3.4%
Rust 2.9%
Shell 0.4%
Python 0.4%
Other 0.3%