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

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2026-04-15

YouTube video id: h403btjldDQ

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h403btjldDQ

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
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
a bit of a headline. I would say that
Paperclip is the human control plane for
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
you want the default options, but
let me talk about like what is
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
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
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
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
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
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
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."
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
this uh routine, we say use the grep
loop skill after you've submitted the
PR. And that way um it will go to
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
like using cursor or GitHub, you can use
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
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,
uh what paperclip has produced is simply
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
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
lot of
uh other companies over here. When you
create your own company, you'll be
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
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
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.
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
your initial task, but we can just leave
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
can do anything uh except know what you
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
agents are live.
By default, the agents are actually
configured to only run um one in
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
instructions here that I am constantly
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
the whole test suite, and so on, right?
I'm giving my agents instructions on a
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
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
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
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
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
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
maximizer.
Another piece you'll notice is missing
is that there's not multiple human
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,
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
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]
So, well, that is Paperclip in a
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
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
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.