Paperclip: Hire AI Agents Like Employees (Live Demo)

Overview

Duda introduces Paperclip, an open-source agent orchestrator for building zero-human companies, emphasizing its bring-your-own-bot approach and local operation. He demonstrates how to use Paperclip to manage AI agents for business goals, configure agent personas with heartbeats and skills, and leverage community-built agentic patterns for improved results.

Key takeaways

Paperclip enables users to bring their own AI models, such as Claude or OpenAI, allowing for customized agent personalities and cost-effective task delegation.
Agent heartbeats are crucial for defining an AI agent's responsibilities upon waking up, ensuring they remember their purpose and tasks.
Paperclip's routines feature allows users to create templates for recurring issues, such as daily Discord updates, with detailed tracking of token spend and agent actions.
Duda emphasizes that AI can do everything except know your values, so leaders must clearly communicate their taste and preferences to agents.
Paperclip will soon allow importing and exporting entire company structures, enabling users to leverage proven agentic patterns from community repositories like Gary Tan's G stack.
Paperclip's upcoming maximizer mode will prioritize task completion over token spending, ensuring agents continuously work towards goals with the necessary resources.

Chapters

0:00 Paperclip: Orchestrating AI Agents for Zero-Human Companies

Paperclip is an open-source project for orchestrating AI agents into self-running companies with roles, goals, and budgets.
Duda, the creator, explains how to use Paperclip to manage a team of AI agents for business tasks.
Paperclip aims to give more control than fully automatic tools like Pulsia by focusing on managing business goals.

0:53 Paperclip's Architecture: Bring Your Own Bot

Paperclip allows users to bring their own AI models, such as Cursor, Claude, or OpenAI, into the system.
Duda notes that different models have different personalities, making the bring-your-own-bot approach valuable.
Greg and Duda decide to use the idea browser to select a case study: a finance app that builds money habits in 3 minutes a day.

5:37 Setting Up a Company and Hiring a CEO Agent

Duda recommends using Claude Code or Codex for the CEO agent and supports other agent types via OpenRouter.
OpenRouter offers free models, enabling cost-effective task delegation.
Paperclip primarily works locally, with cloud deployment options in development.

12:30 Managing Agents and Approving Tasks

Paperclip tracks monthly token spend and agent work through issues.
The CEO agent is tasked with hiring a founding engineer and creating a hiring plan.
Users can manually approve agent actions, such as hiring, for better control.

18:31 Agent Configuration: Personas, Memory, and Heartbeats

Duda emphasizes the importance of configuring agents with personas, memory, and heartbeats.
Paperclip uses a file-based memory system inspired by the PARA method and Nat Eliason's Felix bot.
Agent heartbeats define the agent's responsibilities upon waking up, ensuring they remember their purpose.

22:39 Evaluating Agent Performance and Adding Skills

Duda recommends evaluating the quality of agent prompts and adding rules to improve performance.
Users can add skills to agents, such as the Remotion skill for video editing, using skills.sh.
Duda cautions about the security risks of installing skills and suggests looking for security audit badges and GitHub stars as indicators of safety.

35:35 Providing Context and Planning Video Content

Duda explains that Paperclip doesn't automatically provide context but offers tools to help organize documents and artifacts.
He suggests creating a brand guide and planning video content to provide agents with the necessary context.
Duda creates an issue to plan a 60-second Remotion video about Moola, assigning it to the CEO agent.

42:30 Agentic Design Patterns and Company Structure

Duda discusses the importance of agentic design patterns for structuring companies effectively.
He suggests implementing processes like having engineers ask QA to review their work.
Duda emphasizes the need for a design agent to detect issues and maintain app quality without micromanagement.

Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, Greg Isenberg.