One Free Tool Turns Your Scattered AI Agents Into a Functioning Company
Paperclip just launched on GitHub with 1.6 million views in its first week. Here is exactly what it does and how to get started in under five minutes.
If you have ever run three AI agents at once and lost track of what each one was doing, you already understand the problem Paperclip was built to fix. The tool just launched on GitHub and hit 1.6 million views in its first week. It is completely free, self-hosted, and takes about five minutes to get running.
The core idea is simple. You are already using the workers. Claude Code in one terminal, Codex somewhere else, Cursor open in another window. You copy outputs between them. Your computer restarts and you lose everything. Paperclip does not replace any of those tools. It gives them a company to work inside.
"Every agent gets a role, a boss, and a budget. You stay in control as the board of directors."
WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOES
Paperclip organizes your agents the way a real company organizes its people. You create an org chart with titles like CEO, CTO, and engineer. Each agent gets a job description and a direct report structure. That structure is not cosmetic. It determines how work flows between agents throughout the day.
You set one company goal at the top, something like "build an AI note-taking app to $1M monthly recurring revenue." That goal breaks into projects. Projects break into tasks. Every agent working on a task can see the full context, not just what to do but why it matters in the bigger picture.
THE EIGHT FEATURES THAT MATTER
Org Charts. Real reporting structures that control how work flows between agents.
Goal Alignment. Every task connects back to one company mission so agents always know the bigger picture.
Heartbeats. Agents wake on a schedule, check for work, do it, and go back to sleep. No idle burning.
Budget Controls. Monthly spending limits per agent. When they hit the cap, they stop. No surprise bills.
Ticket System. Every conversation, tool call, and decision is logged with a full audit trail.
Any Agent, Any Provider. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, plain Bash scripts, or any HTTP-accessible agent.
Multi-Company Support. One installation, completely separate data and budgets for each company you run.
Governance. You approve hires, review strategy changes, and can pause any agent at any time.
ON BUDGET CONTROLS
The budget feature deserves a moment of attention. Every agent gets a monthly spending limit in dollars. When the agent hits that number, it stops. Paperclip tracks every token spent in real time across every agent running inside a company. If you have ever woken up to find that an agent got stuck in a loop overnight and burned through hundreds of dollars, this feature alone is worth the five-minute setup.
ON THE TICKET SYSTEM
All work happens through tickets. Every conversation is threaded. Every tool call is traced. Every decision is logged with a timestamp and a reason. When something goes wrong, and at some point something will go wrong, you can trace back exactly what happened and when. This is the kind of visibility that makes autonomous agents actually usable in production.
HOW TO GET STARTED IN FIVE MINUTES
There are two ways to install. The one-command method is the fastest. Open your terminal and run:
npx paperclipai onboard --yes
Paperclip installs, sets up the database, and opens a dashboard at localhost:3100. No separate setup needed.
If you prefer to do it manually:
git clone https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip.git cd paperclip pnpm install pnpm dev
Requirements are Node.js version 20 or higher and pnpm version 9.15 or higher. No account. No subscription. No external database to configure. Everything runs on your own machine under the MIT license.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU LOG IN
The setup flow is designed to feel familiar. You create your first company and write out the mission. You hire your first agent, which starts as a CEO. The CEO then recommends hiring more agents based on the goal you set, typically a coder next. You approve the hires, set the budgets, and agents begin working on tasks toward that goal. You manage the whole operation from the dashboard, on your laptop or your phone.
WHAT IS COMING NEXT
The team behind Paperclip is building something called ClipMart. The idea is a marketplace where you can download entire pre-built companies with one click. Browse a library of templates, pick a marketing agency or a SaaS builder or a content studio, import it into Paperclip, and you have a fully staffed AI company ready to run. It has not launched yet but it is on the public roadmap.
"If you have ever had ten Claude Code terminals open and lost track of what each one was doing, Paperclip is your answer."
WHO THIS IS ACTUALLY FOR
Paperclip is not for someone who uses one AI tool for one task. It is for people who are already running multiple agents and need a way to coordinate them. If you are at the stage where AI tools have genuinely improved your output but the coordination overhead is becoming a second job, this is the layer that was missing.
Paperclip was created by a developer who goes by the handle @dotta on GitHub. It is fully open source under the MIT license, which means you can inspect the code, fork it, and modify it without asking anyone's permission. That matters when you are trusting a tool to manage agents that have access to your projects and spending limits.
Try Paperclip today: https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip
Free to use. Self-hosted. No account required.