Paperclip: Hire AI Agents Like Employees (Live Demo)

By Greg Isenberg

Categories: Startup, Product

Summary

Paperclip is an open-source agent orchestrator that hit 30,000 GitHub stars in 3 weeks by letting founders manage AI agents like employees with org charts, goals, and budgets—positioned between fully automated tools like Pulsai and manual coding tools, with a 'bring your own bot' model supporting multiple LLMs.

Key Takeaways

  1. Paperclip uses a goal-management framework where you define business objectives, hire AI agents, and approve their work—balancing automation with accountability, unlike fully autonomous tools.
  2. The 'bring your own bot' architecture is critical because different LLMs have distinct personalities; entrepreneurs should use Cursor Cloud, Claude Code, or other tools simultaneously rather than choosing one.
  3. Paperclip works best on local machines with Claude Code or Codeex pre-installed, and recommends using one of these tools for your CEO agent specifically.
  4. The product positioning explicitly rejects the 'zero human companies' narrative as aspirational—it's designed for work you're accountable for, not fully autonomous business operation.
  5. The workflow involves naming your company, defining its mission in a text box, then creating your first agent with a simple interface—designed for rapid iteration on business ideas.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

How do you turn a group of AI agents into a company that actually runs itself? You know, with org charts, roles, goals, budgets, and agents working around the clock 24/7. There's this project called Paperclip. Maybe you've seen it because it just blew up. It got 30,000 GitHub stars in the last 3 weeks. And it's an open- source project that's building the orchestration layer for exactly that, hiring a team of AI agents. So, I sat down with Dota. He's the creator. and it's one of the first times h...