Paperclip AI Orchestration

Skill by ara.so — Daily 2026 Skills collection.

Paperclip is an open-source Node.js + React platform that runs a company made of AI agents. It provides org charts, goal alignment, ticket-based task management, budget enforcement, heartbeat scheduling, governance, and a full audit log — so you manage business outcomes instead of individual agent sessions.

Installation

Quickstart (recommended)

npx paperclipai onboard --yes

This clones the repo, installs dependencies, seeds an embedded PostgreSQL database, and starts the server.

Manual setup

git clone https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip.git
cd paperclip
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Requirements:

• Node.js 20+
• pnpm 9.15+

The API server starts at http://localhost:3100. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no manual DB setup needed for local development.

Production setup

Point Paperclip at an external Postgres instance and object storage via environment variables:

# .env
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@host:5432/paperclip
STORAGE_BUCKET=your-s3-bucket
STORAGE_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
PORT=3100

Key CLI Commands

pnpm dev              # Start API + UI in development mode
pnpm build            # Build for production
pnpm start            # Start production server
pnpm db:migrate       # Run pending database migrations
pnpm db:seed          # Seed demo data
pnpm test             # Run test suite
npx paperclipai onboard --yes   # Full automated onboarding

Core Concepts

REST API

The Paperclip API is served at http://localhost:3100/api/v1.

Authentication

// All requests require a bearer token
const headers = {
  'Authorization': `Bearer ${process.env.PAPERCLIP_API_KEY}`,
  'Content-Type': 'application/json',
};

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