I have been running a small AI team — a handful of agents doing research, writing, and content production. The biggest challenge was not the AI. It was managing the AI.
Which agent is doing what? Who ran up the API bill? Is anyone stuck on a task? I was spending more time orchestrating than the agents spent working.
Then I found Paperclip — and it changed everything.
What is Paperclip?
Paperclip calls itself the open-source OS for AI companies. With 60,000+ GitHub stars, it is the most popular solution nobody is talking about.
Think of it as: - Asana/Trello → but designed for AI agents, not humans - AWS Budgets → but per-agent, per-project, with hard stops - PagerDuty → but for agent heartbeats and auto-recovery All in one open-source package.
3 Killer Features
1. Heartbeat Engine
Agents are not always online. Paperclip wakes them up when there is work, checks their budget first, injects secrets, and monitors execution. If an agent crashes mid-task? Auto-recovery.
2. Budget Control
Budget granularity: Company → Agent → Project → Task → Provider → Model. When budget is exceeded: Pause agent + Cancel queued tasks. No surprise bills.
3. Atomic Task Checkout
One task, one agent. Always. No two agents ever work on the same thing. Tasks carry goal lineage — the agent always knows why it is doing this.
Getting Started
npx paperclipai onboard --yes
or clone and run locally:
git clone https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip
cd paperclip
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Stack: Node.js 20+, React, PostgreSQL, MIT License
GitHub: github.com/paperclipai/paperclip (60k+ stars)
If you are managing 3+ AI agents and not using Paperclip, you are spending too much time orchestrating. I learned this the hard way so you do not have to.
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