Paperclip: Open Source Human Control Plane for AI Labor — Dotta Bippa

Welcome to getting started with Paperclip and I'm Doda, your host and the creator of Paperclip and I'm so excited to show you how to get started

with this brand new open-source agent orchestrator. I'm going to walk

agent orchestrator. I'm going to walk you through your first steps of how to get Paperclip started, what it looks like when you have a huge organization, and some of my best advanced tips for

working with AI agents and so you can create your own uh zero-human company.

Now, the tagline that we have for Paperclip is that it's for open-source orchestration for zero-human companies.

Um, you can hire employees, set goals, automate jobs, your business can nearly run itself. Well, you know, maybe that's

run itself. Well, you know, maybe that's a bit of a headline. I would say that Paperclip is the human control plane for AI labor. Really, the idea behind

AI labor. Really, the idea behind Paperclip is that you're able to set up an org chart of agents where you can

manage them all and um invoke your taste in what these agents how they work and have them complete real work. Um, so let me walk you through a little bit how it

it how to get started. The first thing that you do is you should just open up your terminal and run NPX Paperclip AI onboard. You can pass dash dash yes if

onboard. You can pass dash dash yes if you want the default options, but let me talk about like what is

Paperclip. Paperclip is a um a a way you

Paperclip. Paperclip is a um a a way you can accomplish real work that you are accountable for using AI agents. You

maybe you've seen tools um where they have you create a task and then it automatically creates a business for you. With Paperclip, um you actually

for you. With Paperclip, um you actually are involved in the steps to have your

preferences accounted for and um and you are involved in the task process from the higher-level design all the way to actually executing. So, what I'm going

actually executing. So, what I'm going to do here actually is I'm going to show you this is the real instance that I use uh to manage Paperclip itself. And I'm

going to walk you through a little bit um this kind of finished product and then we'll start a brand new company and I'll show you how you can do it on your own. So, this is the company that I use

own. So, this is the company that I use to manage Paperclip itself. You've got

here the CEO who's the man in charge.

We've got a CTO and under him he has quite a lot of coders. Um, I would say that the two coders that I use the most would be the Codex coder as well as the Claude coder.

And an important thing about Paperclip is that you bring your own agent. So,

you can use Gemini, you can use Pi, you can use Hermes, you can use Open Claw. A

key part of Paperclip is that any agent that you want to use can be brought into Paperclip as an employee and then it can

sort of negotiate and communicate and have its memory stored with the rest of Paperclip.

If you look over here for a quick example, we've got our marketing organization.

And one of the things that we have here under the CMO is content strategist and also a video writer. Now, we have been super thankful with how quickly

Paperclip has grown. We actually crossed this week 40,000 GitHub stars, which I was stoked about.

Um, and it's really through kind of the contributions of the whole community.

Probably by the time you're watching this, we've already crossed 50,000 stars. Now, normally what I would do is

stars. Now, normally what I would do is I would actually just publish a tweet or at most a screenshot celebrating 40,000 stars and call it a day, but I realized, you know, I wonder

if I can use Paperclip to accelerate this process. And so, what I did is I

this process. And so, what I did is I came in here and I created a new issue.

And I assigned it to my CEO. The idea

behind Paperclip is that you are the CEO and you are working um you are basically giving your CEO instructions and then your CEO is

designed to break down the tasks to your executive branch and then down to the individual individual contributors. So, one of the

individual contributors. So, one of the things that I did is I asked the CEO, "Please hire a video writer and have

them write a a Remotion video uh celebrating 40,000 stars."

40,000 stars." So, here's the thing.

Every [snorts] piece of the Paperclip app has an agentic surface. So, your CEO knows how to hire new agents. They know

how to install new skills. There is a skills manager built into Paperclip. So,

for example, I'm sure you've seen skills.sh.

skills.sh.

From there, um we would install the Remotion best practices skill. The CEO

knows how to find this and do this.

And Remotion, if you don't know, is a open-source React uh I actually don't know if it's React base. It's an open-source tool that you

base. It's an open-source tool that you can use for creating videos. You don't

need to sign up for anything. The CEO

hired our video writer agent and gave her the Remotion best practices skill.

Yeah, video creation in React.

And from there, I was able to create a prompt to say, "Plan this video for the stats dashboard." So, I say, "Go look at

stats dashboard." So, I say, "Go look at the dashboard where at mentioning another project that we already have."

We already had a dashboard. And our

stats our stats, you know, these agents can don't mind typos. Make a plan for a Remotion video that we can create to celebrate 40,000 stars. Okay, boom. So,

this was my entire prompt right here to make this video that I showed you over here. I I I wrote this prompt and

over here. I I I wrote this prompt and then the agent wrote this plan.

Um Paperclip has first-place first-class support for plans. And

um then after I read the plan briefly, I gave it some feedback. I said, "You know what? Your cuts need to be like 2

what? Your cuts need to be like 2 seconds, not 6, and just have the 40,000 stars animate, etc., right?" So, I go through here and I actually give my agent we have a bit of a conversation

around how we want the video to look and then bam, within about uh 5 minutes we had this like beautiful animation that is on brand, that's the real stats, it has charts, and and and so the question

is like, well, how did it have all this context? And the answer is that it had

context? And the answer is that it had it from Paperclip. you could do this with Claude code and what you would have to do is you'd have to go track down all your stats, you would have to track down

your brand guide, you'd have to give it the Remotion skill, you have to give it access to your dashboard. With

Paperclip, all of those things are built into the system. So, for example, um we already have the dashboard, we already have a Paperclip branding guide, which

the agents already know about for the brand identity. So, when we create videos, we

identity. So, when we create videos, we know that it looks good and something that might have taken me a week actually becomes an afterthought with Paperclip.

So, um let me point out another really interesting thing here is because we are now um creating multiple videos, we've created some other videos with the same

um agent.

We actually can go over the list of feedback that we've given our agents and learn how to make the skill better where we have not only a generic Remotion skill, but also a Paperclip specific

skill that has our branding guides, our preferences, our style like pacing choices. Right? If we start to see that

choices. Right? If we start to see that the agents are always having their cuts be 2 seconds and not 6, then um that gives us something that we can learn

from over time. And so, for now, how that happens is you create an agent which learns from the conversations, but this will be something that's built more into Paperclip in the future versions.

Something I want to note is that we released Paperclip on uh March 4th. It

is now April 8th, so we're looking at something like 34 days, give or take, of being in open-source. We've already had an incredible amount of pull requests and I want you to know that it's getting

better every single day. So, this would be one of the like sort of most simple ideas with Paperclip, which is um hopefully it looks sort of obvious. You

um have an org chart where you create these agents. You can configure them

these agents. You can configure them however you'd like. You have projects, which are very familiar to the sort of like task management interface. Um and

then your agents are assigned these projects and then they uh these tasks and um and then they work through the tasks to complete the work. But of course, as um

anyone knows, uh keeping them on task can always be a bit of a challenge. And

so, Paperclip provides um a variety of kind of workflows that are important to the orchestrator in order to um actually

uh complete the work successfully. So,

for example, one of the main things that you will often see in a good Paperclip organization would be QA. Um the QA agent has the agent browser skill, which

is a skill that lets you trigger tasks like open a website, fill out a form, click a button. Probably if you use agents, you're already using this skill.

And one of the things that you'll want to be able to do is have it uh configured such that your tasks are

require a reviewer or potentially an approver. And this idea is I'm sure

approver. And this idea is I'm sure you've tried this in Claude code before where you might have 30 Claude code tabs open, you can't remember what they're

all working on, and you um and and then you ask your coding agent say, "Hey, please test this in the browser before you send it back to me."

And what happens? It doesn't do it, right? Um you you have and so people are

right? Um you you have and so people are creating all sorts of these complicated hooks and harnesses, but of course hooks only work one way in Claude and another way in Codex.

And everyone knows that these agents just have such different personalities.

Anyone who does work at agentic work knows that you really want to be able to pull in models from lots of different labs. And

labs. And and and so paperclip gives you this kind of vendor-neutral harness where you can create these higher-level workflows where you can say when the assignee is

complete uh is finished with this task, you must have the QA agent boot and give a review on it. You also can have um an approver, right? So these are two sort

approver, right? So these are two sort of different roles because um QA might review it and then you iterate between the coder and the reviewer. And but the manager might be the one who kind of

approves it and says, "Yes, the work that the two of you did is sufficient to be take part in our organization and our brand." So

brand." So um one of the things that you will find when you use paperclip is that there's just this higher degree of reliability to making sure that your agents actually complete the work that you instructed

them to do. So

um there are other ways that you can have workflows with your agents. For

example, we have routines.

One of the things that I use paperclip for a lot is um I I use um Twitter bookmarks to be able to track ideas that I'm interested in especially to um

improve paperclip. So we can come here

improve paperclip. So we can come here and look at some of the uh bookmarks. Uh

let me see. We can look here at some of the bookmarks that I saved uh a day ago.

And within the routines uh section, what you're able to do is is set up things like, you know, here's how we deal with the PR. Create a Discord message of

the PR. Create a Discord message of everything that was merged into the master branch today. Write the release change log.

Um and you can sort of group these by project or agent. And and and these would be things that you can set up to run on a schedule. Or you can also set them to run manually um with template

variables in them. Like for example, you know, create a single PR in this branch.

And and then when we go to run it, you've got these variables where you can put in the branch that you're talking about. So when you finally have these

about. So when you finally have these reusable tasks that you're you're you know, instead of kind of having a prompt folder or having to copy and paste um you can create these routines. You know,

it overlaps a little bit with um skills for example. You you also can use your

for example. You you also can use your skills in your routines. Of certainly

there's a bit of like overlap in terms of how you manage it, right? Maybe you

already have a PR branch for uh PR merging skill for your organization, you should certainly use that. For example,

for the open-source project, we use greptile in order to do code reviews, first-pass code reviews for community contributions. And you can see here in

contributions. And you can see here in this uh routine, we say use the grep loop skill after you've submitted the PR. And that way um it will go to

PR. And that way um it will go to GitHub. It will review

GitHub. It will review the uh changes uh and and come back. But I will say that this right here is very much a kind of coding workflow. And the important

thing I want you to understand about paperclip is that it is not a coding tool.

Paperclip is not a code review tool.

Paperclip is designed for creating uh businesses. If you are a coder and you

businesses. If you are a coder and you like using cursor or GitHub, you can use those. But you do not have to be a coder

those. But you do not have to be a coder to use paperclip. Um you can use paperclip to um to to run your marketing, to help

deal with uh sales leads, to uh deal with finance operations. This is

designed to be a tool that everyone in your organization can use to wrangle AI agents. So if we go back to this example

agents. So if we go back to this example of uh looking at our bookmarks for example, here's one where we have the report where there's a bookmark strategy report where we look at um you know, some of

these these other execution uh adapters, some memory adapters. Um

the ideas around uh using CLIs versus chat. And today when you look at this,

chat. And today when you look at this, uh what paperclip has produced is simply a report. However, uh the paperclip of

a report. However, uh the paperclip of tomorrow will have buttons in here where you can say, "Well, create an issue out of this. Why don't you create a plan for

of this. Why don't you create a plan for this? Why don't we why don't we start to

this? Why don't we why don't we start to integrate this as a feature into our app where it will be surfacing a lot more of sort of action into uh what you are

the work products that you are sort of getting out of paperclip. So

um this is sort of the first version of paperclip. You can see that I've got a

paperclip. You can see that I've got a lot of uh other companies over here. When you

create your own company, you'll be prompted. We can say, "Oh, let's say

prompted. We can say, "Oh, let's say uh you know, Doda's MCP directory."

Let's say we wanted to have a MCP directory where we uh like like like a like agent tools directory. Let's call

it this. Agent tools directory.

And um the goal of this company is to uh charge for hosted agent tools. We are a proxy for all uh

agent tools. We are a proxy for all uh third-party tools. So your agent just

third-party tools. So your agent just has to off one time and you can control control it, right? Something like this.

Um the initial agent we might hire is the CEO. You can see we've got all kinds

the CEO. You can see we've got all kinds of addition additional agent types, Gemini, open code, Hermes, Pi, cursor.

Um I prefer Claude code or Codex for your CEO. I think that's a good idea.

your CEO. I think that's a good idea.

And uh then from there, after this agent is created, we say, "Hire your first engineer and create a hiring plan." Now

again, your work might not have anything to do with engineering. You might be doing with marketing or um sales or something else. So feel free to edit

something else. So feel free to edit your initial task, but we can just leave this now. Um we can say um uh

this now. Um we can say um uh the initial product will need uh partners from the large SaaS companies or what

however you want to think about your business. That's, you know, these tools

business. That's, you know, these tools can do anything uh except know what you value. And so what you need to be able

value. And so what you need to be able to do is to communicate accurately what you sort of expect this to do. So you

can see we've got a new org here. This

org really only has one agent, our CEO.

Our CEO right now is working on our hiring plan. Um and we'll come sort of

hiring plan. Um and we'll come sort of watch him and uh let him work. We'll let

him do his work.

Now one of the things that I would tell you as you are building out your organization, we have um there are templates that exist where you can import huge organizations by default

and try to use them. My suggestion for you when you're just getting started with agents is just start with the agents that you need. You don't actually have to install um something like uh

that has 130 agents and huge marketing team and um you know, you you really like if you if you don't take the time to kind of craft for the agents how you

expect them to behave, then you won't get good results. Okay, look here. Our

CEO is actually um uh is asking us if they can hire a CTO.

Great. We will approve this. We approve.

You may hire this chief technology officer.

And um now that we've approved it, we'll sort of let him him work. So

yeah, some of the key things that I want to tell you is that you need to build your organization sort of agent by agent. Make sure the quality level is

agent. Make sure the quality level is high and that it actually necessitates you fanning out into other agents. Um

you know, everything that you do might not need to pay frontier model prices.

You might not need to pay um Claude for example for or or or open AI for every agent. Maybe just your most intelligent agents need to do that.

We support um open code and open router through open code as an agent, which means that you can go to their router and you can find all sorts of other models that will be cheaper. I mean,

look here. The Quinn 3.6 plus is actually free right now. So you could hire an agent that uses Quinn 3.6 plus and uh you will won't have to pay for inference

until you sort of hit the limits. And so

yeah, I think open router is a great resource for kind of uh maybe some agents for which these models are good enough.

That said, I would also say that you many of these models won't be um great for high intelligence services.

You may need um some better models for uh for your best work. So

um here you go. You can see that we've got our first engineer and create a hiring plan. We've got a hiring plan

hiring plan. We've got a hiring plan here. Um the CEO says, "All right, phase

here. Um the CEO says, "All right, phase one, hire a CTO. Then uh

core engineering, go to market, whatever." We have approved it. And um

whatever." We have approved it. And um

now we um just want to say like we approve the plan. Keep going.

Right? So we'll tell the CEO that we approve and he is able to hire the rest of the crew.

Now one of the things with paperclip is it does keep track of your monthly spent. You can set budgets per agent and

spent. You can set budgets per agent and budgets per project. Um we uh you're seeing zero monthly spent here because we are able to use the subscriptions at the moment. We're using subscriptions

the moment. We're using subscriptions for uh both Claude and Codex. Of course, as your team scales up, that might not uh be the case. All right. So you can see

our CEO has started um a bit more like work where we're building prototype SaaS partner integration, setting up development infrastructure, defining the product infrastructure. All of these

product infrastructure. All of these agents are live.

By default, the agents are actually configured to only run um one in parallel. So, if you are getting kind of

parallel. So, if you are getting kind of nerdy, you can dig in here to the concurrency and add more. We're just

going to leave it on the defaults for now.

And one of the important things I want to tell you is it is very important that you configure your agents to do what you want them to do. So, let me show you my

CodeX coder. I actually have

CodeX coder. I actually have instructions here that I am constantly working on. Like I'm adding things by

working on. Like I'm adding things by saying, you know, uh if there's a blocker, tell us your best guess on how to fix it. Don't just say it's blocked.

Say here give me a tutorial on how to fix it. If you write tests, don't write

fix it. If you write tests, don't write the whole test suite, and so on, right?

I'm giving my agents instructions on a regular basis. Whenever they do

regular basis. Whenever they do something wrong, you want to stop and take the time and have it um do better.

We even start to create sort of um meta agents. Like here we have a skill

agents. Like here we have a skill consultant. And the skill consultant's

consultant. And the skill consultant's job is to actually work with the other agents within the organization to make sure that they're using their skills to the best of their ability. When we have

an agent that isn't using skills that we expect, we come and we ask the skill consultant to sort of um do a diagnosis and iterate on it. And

I would say in the version that you're seeing at Paperclip today, many of these steps are manual. This kind of organizational learning is something that we are building into Paperclip to happen for you automatically. Now,

[snorts] this Paperclip version is very, very early. Um there are some

early. Um there are some missing pieces. We have introduced um

missing pieces. We have introduced um experimental support for uh workspaces, so you can have isolated workspaces.

This is more of a coding thing where you can manage um pull requests and uh work trees. We are adding uh features like

trees. We are adding uh features like the CEO chat, so you can see our roadmap here on uh the GitHub repo. Hey, look at this. We just crossed 50,000 stars. You

this. We just crossed 50,000 stars. You

were here for the first moment that I saw us cross 50,000 stars. Incredible.

So, um you can see our roadmap here where we talk about that we are going to add uh more about artifacts and deployments. We're going to add a CEO

deployments. We're going to add a CEO chat. We're adding maximizer mode, which

chat. We're adding maximizer mode, which is when you've got uh a dream and tokens to burn, and you want the agents to work as hard as they can um to do whatever it

takes to create your uh business, and you want them to keep going without stopping. That would be the Paperclip

stopping. That would be the Paperclip maximizer.

Another piece you'll notice is missing is that there's not multiple human users. That is a huge gap. We are

users. That is a huge gap. We are

working on this feature really this week um because you should be able to deploy it to a cloud and have your entire team work on Paperclip. We're also working on cloud and sandboxing agents, so that

you'll be able to uh run agents in E2B or dev.exe or cloud agent deployments,

or dev.exe or cloud agent deployments, any of these things. Um and we're also working on a desktop app, which will be a free open-source app, and cloud

deployments will host a Paperclip cloud.

And really just general like stability, um working with memory, um the knowledge base, these are all sort of features that we'll be adding over the next 30 days. So, probably by the time you're

days. So, probably by the time you're watching this video, um check out the latest version of Paperclip because you will see a lot more of these features um

into the app, and it'll be that much more powerful. Um [snorts]

more powerful. Um [snorts] So, well, that is Paperclip in a nutshell. Um you can see that our agents

nutshell. Um you can see that our agents are working to set up the deployment infrastructure, the CI pipeline, building some initial partner integrations. I think one of the first

integrations. I think one of the first things we're going to want to do is have it work on the marketing. Um

And really the idea with Paperclip is it's a free product that will give you the power as a human to to to have control over AI labor. Do not worry

about AI taking your job. When you use a something like Paperclip, you will be in charge of thousands of agents um helping you build your business, helping you with your company. Um it it Paperclip is

a free tool that you can use um to manage the chaos of work um where you can debug what's happening. You can guide your

what's happening. You can guide your individual employees. You can provide

individual employees. You can provide them the context they need to do the work that's required, to bring it up to the quality of your brand. So, yeah.

Go to paperclip.ing right now.

Type this command. Fire up Paperclip.

Even if you're not technical, you can use Paperclip today uh to help you with your AI agent. So, thanks so much, and uh go download Paperclip.