Transcript
00:00:00I gave three AI agents the same repo, and together they formed a company. One tried to build the
00:00:06feature, one rewrote the architecture, and one opened and dealt with all the tickets. With no
00:00:12structure, every multi-agent setup slowly turns into confusion and racks up the bill.
00:00:17This is Paperclip, and it's trying to fix that. One command gives you local control plane for
00:00:22AI agents with organizational charts, tickets, budgets, audit logs, and even heartbeats.
00:00:27It's just crossed over 64,000 stars on GitHub.
00:00:30Let's set up our own company with a few AI agents in a couple minutes.
00:00:33Now here's the thing with agents. A single agent feels nice. You give it a task, it writes some
00:00:44code. Great job. Then you give a second agent, maybe even a third agent. And what happens is
00:00:51suddenly that just turns into management work. Who owns the task? That's the question. Who's
00:00:57remembering the goal out of this, and who stops the agent when it starts doing the wrong thing?
00:01:03That's the problem Paperclip is trying to solve. Raw agents working alone aren't great. Useful,
00:01:08but hard to coordinate. Paperclip turns them into a team, or I guess in this case it's called a
00:01:13company. We define a company goal. We create an organizational chart. Maybe there's a CEO, a CTO,
00:01:20two engineers, and a research agent. Then Paperclip coordinates the work through tickets, heartbeats,
00:01:27your budgets, approvals, and traceability. We can see the task, who assigned it, how much it actually
00:01:33spent on that task, and whether it still connects to the end goal. Less vibes-based orchestration?
00:01:39Let's actually see this live. If you enjoy coding tools to speed up your workflow, be sure to
00:01:43subscribe. We have videos coming out all the time. All right, now watch this. In a clean terminal,
00:01:49I'm just going to run NPX Paperclip AI onboard. That starts up the local setup. Now a few moments
00:01:56later, Paperclip is running with the dashboard. I have local services, Postgres comes with it,
00:02:03and auth. This is the whole UI here now where I can actually create a new company. I'm going to
00:02:09create a new company and call it dev tools company, or really whatever you're trying to build. For this,
00:02:14I'm going to say this goal. The goal is simple. I want to build and ship a URL shortener MVP this
00:02:20week. Now I can add a CTO agent. Then I can add two engineers through adapters. One of these engineer
00:02:28agents owns the backend. The other owns the frontend and test coverage. Now, before I hit
00:02:34start, I'm going to set the budget. And this part's what really matters because the goal is to not let
00:02:39the agents cook my API till the bill explodes. No, the goal is controlled autonomy. I also need to set
00:02:46the path to my working directory where the code is going to be output. So I'm going to set that here.
00:02:50Now I can hit those heartbeats and I can start it. And let's watch the board. The agents wake up
00:02:57on heartbeat. The CTO breaks the goal into tickets. Our engineers here, they're now picking up work.
00:03:05So you can see delegation, tickets, ancestry, status changes, the budget counter, all of this
00:03:10tied together. And now the first implementation task is already moving toward a code commit.
00:03:15This actually took quite a bit of time to run, but I guess having all these agents together,
00:03:19that makes a little sense, but still it's not the fastest, especially if you're trying to scale this
00:03:24even more. This is not one agent sitting in a chat box anymore. This is now a small company that's
00:03:30running by us creating these agents, CEO, CTO, all these engineers. Now this is where people get
00:03:37confused. At first glance, Paperclip sounds like another agent framework, another crew AI, another
00:03:43auto-gen, another Langraph style workflow. That's not really the point. Those tools are great when
00:03:49you want a workflow, right? So for example, I want a researcher, then planner, then writer,
00:03:55then reviewer. Yeah, sure. Of course that's useful. That's why we use them. But Paperclip is aiming at
00:04:01a level higher. It's not just the workers anymore. It's the company that's kind of surrounding these
00:04:07workers in this organizational chart to really help things build out. Think of it like this.
00:04:13A single agent is just an employee. A workflow is like your checklist. Paperclip is the manager,
00:04:20the organizational chart, the ticket board, the budget system, the audit log. That is Paperclip
00:04:25as the manager. So questions you're already asking yourself now, can an agent write code? Well,
00:04:30we already know it can. That's the purpose of this. It's generating that now. The harder questions are,
00:04:36can it work on the right task? Can it stop when it actually should? Can it hand off work clearly?
00:04:43Can I inspect what is even happening here? And the short answer to all of those is yeah, it can.
00:04:49Paperclip gives you state, heartbeats, budget, hierarchy, logs. It even gives you portable
00:04:55templates and a dashboard that feels more like Jira or linear for agents than another chat window.
00:05:02You stop prompting one agent and start controlling this mini organization. Many of us probably still
00:05:07bounce between terminals and setups. One terminal for Claude code, a tab for cursor, an agent for
00:05:13research, one script for GitHub issues, right? All of these different windows were bouncing between,
00:05:18but Paperclip gives all of that a shared operating model. Now the mental model for all of this
00:05:24actually changes for us. So instead of saying, "Hey, please build this future," what we're
00:05:30actually saying now is something more along the lines of this company's goal is to ship this
00:05:35product. Here are the rules in the company. Here's the organizational chart and here's the budget.
00:05:41Here's what needs approval. Now run. Now being honest here, the structure is nice,
00:05:46right? Tickets, ancestry, delegation, all of that, right? Multi-agent work is easier to reason about
00:05:52by having this. Instead of saying the agent did something, bravo. You can actually see who assigned
00:05:58that work, why it exists and where it fits into our code. Being able to set budgets is also huge.
00:06:05A lot of agent tools treat costs like something you check after the fact. Paperclip makes cost
00:06:12part of the whole control loop. We set the budget before we execute. It's self-hosted and open
00:06:17source. Again, huge win there. So you can run it locally, inspect it, modify it and connect it to
00:06:22the agents you're already using. But at the same time of all this good stuff, the same structure
00:06:27that makes Paperclip powerful can also be really annoying. If your rules are bad, agents can create
00:06:32tickets about nonsense. I wanted a URL shortener here simple, but now maybe my CTO agent has opened
00:06:39this whole other plan that I didn't even want. So no thanks to that. Token burn is also real,
00:06:45right? This is why we have budgets to control this, but it doesn't fix sloppy prompts or vague rule
00:06:52definitions. And guys, if your skill MD files suck, your company behaves like a confused startup,
00:06:59right? So skills MD, that's what needs the strength here, right? And finally, honestly,
00:07:03if you're doing a simple script, this is a complete overkill. I just wanted to test this out. I did not
00:07:08need this for this project, but if you just want one agent to summarize a file or patch a bug,
00:07:13you don't need this, right? This is for building out a lot more, having more of these agents working
00:07:18together. It's definitely worth using, but it's not for everything. If you enjoy coding tools and
00:07:23tips like this, be sure to subscribe. We'll see you in another video.
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