Run a Paperclip company from your iPhone
Paperclip is the multi-agent orchestrator of the 2026 personal-agent stack — open-source, self-hosted, and the fastest-growing project in the category at 38,000 GitHub stars in its first four weeks. Onepilot deploys it on a host you can SSH into and makes the iPhone the supervisor.
TL;DR
Paperclip is not an agent. It is the org chart, ticketing system, and budget guardrail that sits above your agents. Hire Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, or a Hermes runtime via the official hermes-paperclip-adapter into named roles, give them goals and budgets, and watch the work move across tickets. Onepilot provisions Paperclip on a Linux or macOS host over SSH and exposes hiring, heartbeats, and approvals through the iPhone — the orchestrator runs server-side, the phone is the control room.
Where Paperclip sits in the stack
| Layer | Agent | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Gateway | OpenClaw | Routes channels (Telegram, Discord, Slack) and plugins |
| Runtime | Hermes | Executes work, learns reusable skills, persists memory |
| Orchestrator | Paperclip | Hires agents into roles, tracks tickets, enforces budgets |
The three layers compose on one host. See the full three-layer overview.
The iPhone as supervisor
Paperclip's design assumes a human approves the high-stakes moves — hiring an agent into a role, raising a budget cap, rolling back a bad config change. The 2026 default workflow is to do those approvals from a phone, because they happen between meetings and not at a desk. Onepilot makes that surface real: each pending action appears as a one-tap card, with the diff or budget delta inline.
From the iPhone you can: hire a CEO agent, see live heartbeats from each employee, approve or deny budget increases, pause the company, audit the ticket log, and rollback any versioned config change. The agents never run on the phone; the phone is where you stay accountable for what the agents do.
Deploying Paperclip from iPhone in four steps
- Pick the host. Any Linux or macOS box you can SSH into works — a Mac mini in the closet, a Raspberry Pi 5, a NAS running sshd, or a small VPS. Onepilot stores SSH credentials in the iOS Keychain.
- Deploy Agent → Paperclip. Onepilot installs Node.js under nvm (no
sudo), pulls the Paperclip repo fromgithub.com/paperclipai/paperclip, runs the interactive setup, and starts the control plane as a background process. - Hire your first CEO agent. Pick a model (Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, or a Hermes runtime via the hermes-paperclip-adapter), give it a budget, and confirm. The CEO agent receives the company goal and starts decomposing it into tickets.
- Supervise. Onepilot's iPhone surface shows the dashboard, heartbeats, ticket diffs, and pending approvals. Pause, rollback, or hire more roles from the phone.
Hiring a Hermes runtime as a Paperclip employee
NousResearch ships an official adapter — hermes-paperclip-adapter — that registers a running Hermes runtime as an employee inside a Paperclip company. The combination is unusually powerful: Paperclip's coordination plus Hermes's self-improving skill memory means the agent gets better at its job ticket by ticket, and Paperclip enforces the budget while it learns.
Onepilot supports the combo natively. Deploy Hermes through the Hermes guide, then deploy Paperclip on the same host and the wizard offers Hermes as a hireable role automatically. The skill files live under the Hermes process; the tickets and budget live under Paperclip; the iPhone shows both.
Limits to be aware of
No on-device orchestration. The control plane does not run on iOS — the dashboard and Node.js server live on the host you picked. The iPhone is a supervision client, not a host.
Paperclip is young. The project launched March 2026. The heartbeat and budget primitives are battle-tested but expect breaking changes between minor versions through 2026. Onepilot pins to a known-good Paperclip version and updates with a confirmation step, not silently.
FAQ
What is Paperclip?
Paperclip is an open-source multi-agent orchestrator — a Node.js server with a React dashboard that hires AI agents into roles inside a virtual company. It is not an agent itself; it has no inference loop. Paperclip handles org charts, goal-to-task decomposition, heartbeats, budget caps, and approval gates so a fleet of agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, anything on OpenRouter) can work in coordinated roles instead of in isolation. The project is published at github.com/paperclipai/paperclip and reached 38,000 GitHub stars within four weeks of its March 2026 launch.
Can I run Paperclip from iPhone?
Yes, through Onepilot. Paperclip's control plane runs on a Linux or macOS host you can SSH into — a Mac mini, a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, or a remote VPS. Onepilot provisions that host, installs Paperclip, hires the first CEO agent, and exposes the company dashboard, heartbeat status, and budget approvals through an iOS surface. The orchestrator runs server-side because iOS does not allow long-running background processes; the iPhone is the supervisor.
What does the iPhone do in a Paperclip company?
The iPhone is the human-in-the-loop checkpoint. From the phone you approve hires, sign off on budget allocations, pause or resume the company, watch heartbeats, audit ticket history, and rollback bad config changes. The agents do the work on the host; the phone is where you stay accountable for it. This matches Paperclip's design — every config change is versioned and every approval is logged.
What agents can Paperclip hire?
Paperclip is bring-your-own-bot. It hires anything that can receive a heartbeat over HTTP — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, OpenCode, Bash scripts, OpenClaw runtimes, Hermes runtimes, and any model reachable through OpenRouter. NousResearch ships an official hermes-paperclip-adapter that runs a Hermes agent as a managed Paperclip employee, with the agent's persistent skills surviving across tickets.
How does the hermes-paperclip-adapter work?
The hermes-paperclip-adapter is a small bridge from NousResearch that registers a running Hermes runtime as an employee in a Paperclip company. Tickets assigned to that employee are received by Hermes through the adapter; Hermes executes the work using its self-improving skill memory, and reports completion back to Paperclip. The adapter means Hermes's persistent skills accumulate across Paperclip tickets — the agent gets smarter the more tickets it closes, instead of starting fresh per task.
What hardware does a Paperclip company need?
A small Linux host runs the orchestrator: the Node.js server, React dashboard, and SQLite or Postgres state. Plan on 2 GB RAM and 20 GB disk for Paperclip alone, plus 2 GB RAM for each concurrent agent it hires. A Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) handles a 2-3 agent home setup; a small VPS handles always-on production work. Onepilot is free; the host and the LLM keys come from you.
How does Paperclip prevent runaway spend?
Paperclip enforces budget caps and atomic task checkout at the orchestrator level. Each agent is hired with a budget; the agent cannot exceed it without human approval. Tasks are checked out atomically, so two agents do not double-work the same ticket. Approval gates pause the company when a configuration change is bad. From the iPhone, Onepilot surfaces these gates as one-tap approvals — you see what's about to spend, and you grant or deny.
Is Paperclip a replacement for OpenClaw or Hermes?
No. Paperclip is the orchestration layer. OpenClaw is the gateway layer (channels, plugins, skills routing). Hermes is the runtime layer (self-improving execution and memory). The three compose: a 2026 setup runs OpenClaw for chat, Hermes for execution, and Paperclip when you need more than one agent reporting to a chain of command. Read the three-layer overview at /agents.
Want the deploy walkthrough?
Step-by-step iPhone-only Paperclip install — provision a host, install Node.js, hire the first CEO agent, configure heartbeats and budget caps:
Read: Deploy Paperclip from iPhone →Run Paperclip from your iPhone
Drop your email and we'll send one note when Onepilot ships on the App Store. Free to get started.
Join the waitlistSee also: OpenClaw, Hermes, or the full stack overview.