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Fenju Fu
Fenju Fu

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Agent Management Is Solved. But Who's Actually Doing the Clicking?

#aiagents #rpa #automation #githubtrending

Scroll through GitHub Trending today and you'll see a pattern:

  • paperclipai/paperclip (~85k stars) — "The open-source app everyone uses to manage agents at work"
  • dream-num/univer — "The Office Harness for AI Agents"
  • androoAGI/starnet — "watch your crew actually run"
  • google/ax — "open agentic orchestration runtime"

The community has decided: agents belong at work, not in chat boxes. We've got management panels, document runtimes, desktop harnesses, and orchestration layers.

But here's the question nobody's asking: who's actually clicking the buttons?

The Execution Gap

univer lets agents read and write spreadsheets programmatically — great if your data lives in a modern API.

But what about:

  • The legacy ERP system that only has a web UI?
  • The internal tool your company built in 2019 with no API?
  • The government portal that requires manual form submission?

That's the execution gap. And it's where RPA (Robotic Process Automation) meets Agent.

Enter astron-rpa

iflytek/astron-rpa is an Agent-ready RPA suite — out-of-the-box automation tools that let agents operate browsers and desktop applications directly.

Think of it this way:

  • paperclip manages your agents → who does what
  • univer provides document runtime → what to read/write
  • astron-rpa provides execution layer → how to actually click, type, and submit

Without the execution layer, your agent is a brilliant mind trapped in a chat box. It can analyze your data, write a report, suggest actions — but it can't do anything.

Astron RPA desktop automation demo

The Full Stack: Agent + RPA + Workflow

For real-world scenarios — like a financial analyst running monthly reconciliation across 3 systems — you need more than just RPA. You need:

  1. Execution (astron-rpa): Agent operates the UI, clicks buttons, fills forms, moves data
  2. Orchestration (astron-agent): Workflow platform handles multi-step tasks, checkpoint/resume for long-running processes

iflytek/astron-agent is an enterprise-grade, commercial-friendly agentic workflow platform for building SuperAgents. It handles the stuff that breaks when you try to automate real work: what if step 3 fails? what if the session expires? what if the data format changed?

Astron Agent workflow orchestration

The Pattern 

Management (paperclip)
    ↓
Orchestration (astron-agent / google/ax)
    ↓
Document Runtime (univer)
    ↓
Execution (astron-rpa) ← the missing piece
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Agents that can chat are 2024. Agents that can click are 2026.

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