DottaandPaperclip a30194e008 perf: avoid company scans in task privacy ancestry (#18024)
## Thinking Path

> - Paperclip is the open source app people use to manage AI agents for
work.
> - Task reads use one shared privacy predicate for detail, list, badge,
and derived access.
> - Its recursive parent join can scan all tasks for each frontier,
including tasks with no parent.
> - A 1,200-task local reproduction inspects 1,440,000 recursive task
rows without finding any parent.
> - Each task has at most one same-company parent, so the query can
probe that parent directly.
> - This pull request exposes that single-parent contract to the planner
and keeps the existing access rules.
> - The result removes repeated scans and avoids JIT in the measured
large callers.

## Linked Issues or Issue Description

Refs #14718 and #17973. I searched public issues and open/closed PRs for
privacy ancestry and privacy performance work. No competing open fix was
found.

**What happened?**

Task privacy checks repeat company task scans and private-project checks
during list and unread badge reads. The recursive join may do this work
even when every parent is NULL.

**Expected behavior**

Read each actual same-company parent through the existing unique task
index. Preserve current grants, project membership, user intersections,
cycle termination, and visibility before pagination.

**Steps to reproduce**

Run `authorization-privacy-query.test.ts` against the pre-fix query. The
semantic ID check passes. Its plan-work assertion fails at 1,440,000
rows against a 3,600-row bound. The same test passes after this change.

**Paperclip version or commit**

Measured baseline `8279c990080b15abdcd9981f5793290fab37f9ad`. The branch
was replayed onto `71b448b9cb841e6fa18fe883585430c5081245da`. Both have
identical pre-fix authorization, issue-service and participation-helper
sources. Treatment source SHA-256 is
`a99faf974070a35f2786c92407e023c668c1f7b99b6604f6281c89bce089b1a8`.

**Deployment mode**

Source checkout, isolated local PostgreSQL 17.11 on ARM64 Linux. No
hosted write, migration, merge, or deployment was performed.

## What Changed

- Skip NULL privacy parents. Use a lateral lookup for the exact
same-company parent through existing indexes.
- Keep `UNION` cycle detection and every existing principal, grant,
private-project and membership expression. Both `LIMIT 1` clauses are
redundant: one anchor and one unique parent give at most one row per
recursive generation. The query still follows a complete deep chain.
- Cover open ancestors inside private projects, including current
project visibility and ancestor grant revocation. Place the benchmark
under `server/scripts/` with ordinary package imports.
- Add real PostgreSQL regressions and a pinned-baseline benchmark for
complete badge/list calls. Keep all 36 measured cells, ranges, neutral
paths, failed experiments, and the single-chain proof in [the query
proof](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/blob/codex/perf-task-privacy-ancestry/doc/plans/2026-10-28-task-privacy-query.md).

## Verification

Local warm full-service medians, with two warmups and five alternating
measured calls per arm:

| Scoped caller | Baseline | Treatment | Ratio |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Dense badge, default JIT | 645.33 ms | 77.11 ms | 8.37x |
| Dense list, default JIT | 214.77 ms | 29.87 ms | 7.19x |
| Sparse list, default JIT | 117.92 ms | 13.22 ms | 8.92x |
| Dense list, JIT off | 55.69 ms | 30.62 ms | 1.82x |
| Sparse list, JIT off | 16.61 ms | 15.12 ms | 1.10x |

All 36 cases match every positional SQL field and row order across all
captured queries. Complete final badge IDs and list objects also match.
Both badge phases and ordinary list enrichment remain in the measured
caller. Dense/sparse fixtures have 1,200 tasks, 300,000 activity rows
and 24,000 comments, with wide random content. Small, unrestricted,
private fan-out, 64-level ancestry, cycle, and JIT on/off controls are
included.

The dense ranking plan reduces recursive task and project work from
720,000 visits each to zero. Its cost estimate falls from 103,000.61 to
20,458.73 and JIT disappears. Separate EXPLAIN execution falls from
524.04 to 34.34 ms. The dense JIT-off main list statement falls from
29.52 to 1.89 ms; remaining service work limits the full-call gain.

**Retained failed goals:** `--assert-performance --max-dense-ms=60`
exited 1. The original 60 ms dense badge goal remains unmet at 77.11 ms.
Four full-service cases also miss the exploratory blanket 2x goal. These
criteria remain in the harness and are not counted as green. The
delivered optimization is proved by the deterministic query-work
red/green test and complete result equality.

Small and unrestricted controls meet their original 25% or 2 ms
allowance. All 12 unrestricted cells use byte-identical SQL and
parameters in both arms; their overlapping timing variation is
neutral/inconclusive. Modest slower scoped controls are retained,
including small JIT-off list 16.18→18.78 ms and cycle JIT-off list
14.78→16.29 ms. There is no claim that all paths improve.

- Final head `328078f494d6ec585936fb75a9410ad39eefd099`: full CI passes
(55 success, 1 neutral, 2 skipped); fresh Greptile is 5/5 with zero
unresolved review threads. The optional Paperclip Review ended neutral
because its worker stopped; its earlier two specific recommendations are
both addressed below.
- Final-runtime focused Docker PostgreSQL run: **44/44 tests passed**
across ancestry work, production privacy, unread badge, and creation
visibility suites. Includes fresh revocation, private projects, grant
direction, three-principal agent intersections, cycles, deep
inheritance, foreign-company parents, and access before LIMIT.
- `pnpm -r typecheck` and `pnpm build`: passed before replay. The real
PostgreSQL ancestry suite passed after replay (5/5 tests, 17.44
seconds). The added private-project ancestor case then passed in the
six-test suite (43.04 seconds). Database and server typechecks and
builds passed after replay; review follow-ups change tests and benchmark
location only. A small relocated-command smoke preserves byte-identical
generated SQL and complete result comparisons.
- `pnpm test:run`: attempted, then stopped with exit 143 after 16 native
database bootstrap failures in 940 executor cases. An independent empty
native `initdb` fails with `semget` semaphore exhaustion before
application SQL. This local full suite is incomplete, not passed. All 16
affected cases then passed on real PostgreSQL 17 Docker in 155.04
seconds (924 other cases were intentionally filtered out).
- An earlier focused command passed 35 tests but skipped eight after a
20-second database setup timeout. The later 44/44 pass resolves that
coverage gap; the failed command is retained.
- The first CI e2e shard attempt completed functional split-handoff
assertions, then cleanup run cancellation hit a one-second row-lock
timeout. The unchanged local-trusted cleanup path does not use the
changed privacy predicate. A single same-head job retry passed. The
original failure is retained.
- The first lateral-only draft removed scans but raised estimated
ancestry rows from 11 to 101 and retained JIT. The per-generation fence
fixes that estimate. No failed attempt was discarded.

Reproduce the measured caller pair:

```sh
pnpm --filter @paperclipai/server exec tsx scripts/benchmark-task-privacy.ts \
  --baseline-ref=71b448b9cb841e6fa18fe883585430c5081245da \
  --evidence-dir=/tmp/task-privacy-proof
```

The full matrix takes about 107 seconds locally, including 8 seconds of
setup. Capture and EXPLAIN run outside ordinary timing samples. Only the
old authorization module changes between arms; caller source and all
relevant query helpers remain constant. Hosted request latency remains
unverified.

## Risks

- The per-generation bound depends on the single anchor and unique
scalar parent contract. A future multi-parent model must revise this
query and its deep/cycle tests.
- Tiny tables can still use a cheap sequential lookup for a real parent.
The guard prevents broad scans for absent parents; it does not force
index use everywhere.
- The 60 ms badge goal and blanket full-service 2x goal remain failed.
Unchanged enrichment, application work and local variation remain
visible in the measurements.
- This changes shared read authorization SQL. No permissions are cached,
no authorization moves after LIMIT, and no schema or startup change is
included.

## Model Used

OpenAI Codex, GPT-6 family, with reasoning, local code execution and
real PostgreSQL profiling. The exact model ID and context-window size
are not exposed by this session. No more specific ID or window size is
claimed.

## 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>
2026-10-28 16:11:01 -05:00
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, 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.

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
2.2 GiB
0 Stars 1 Watchers 0 Forks
Languages
TypeScript 92.6%
JavaScript 3.5%
Rust 2.6%
CSS 0.4%
Shell 0.4%
Other 0.3%