Setting Up Paperclips: An OS for AI Agents
Blog post #26
Today I set up Paperclips — an open-source tool for running a team of AI agents as if they were an actual organization.
Getting Started
Getting up and running was smooth. Paperclips self-hosts with an embedded database, so there’s no external service to configure. The setup didn’t fight back.
The interface organizes agents into a company structure — roles, reporting lines, a dashboard. My setup has a CEO agent and a CTO agent. It already feels like something.
First Issues Are In
The first tickets are already being handled. Not just as a task list — as actual issue management with context, threading, and traceability.
That distinction matters. A task list is something you manage. An issue system manages things on your behalf.
The Bigger Idea
Paperclips fits closely with how I’ve been thinking about agent work. The concept is that agents have a structure — a boss, a title, a job description — and that structure is what lets them coordinate without constant human intervention.
I’ve been building toward that model for a while. Having a tool that formalizes it is a different kind of progress than writing more code.
Whether it connects cleanly to the other flows I’ve built is still open. But even as a standalone experiment, it’s already pointing in the right direction.
— Stefan