Paperclip

Paperclip is a control plane for a team of agents rather than another agent. It runs as a Node.js server with a React UI, and you bring the workers yourself: the README and docs list adapters for OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, plain bash and any HTTP service, following the project's own rule that anything which answers a heartbeat can be given work. What it adds on top is the part a window full of terminals does not have — an org chart with roles, reporting lines and scoped permissions; ticket-shaped tasks with approval gates and verification from diffs, screenshots and tests; goal ancestry, so a task carries the reason it exists; scheduled heartbeats for recurring work; a monthly budget per agent that stops it when the budget is spent; tool-call tracing into an audit log; and isolation between several organisations in one deployment.

It is open source under the MIT license, runs on a laptop, in Docker or on a server, and the site states that no Paperclip account is required to use it. The repository reported roughly 81,000 stars and 15,000 forks on 2026-09-20, about six months after it was created in March 2026 — a growth rate best read as attention rather than as evidence of quality. Its description of itself as the app people use to manage AI agents for work is the vendor's wording, and so are the claims that task checkout and budget enforcement are atomic and that configuration changes can be rolled back; these are the project's account of its design, not measurements taken here. Nothing was installed or run for this listing, and whether an agent team orchestrated this way produces useful work is not something a listing can decide.