Agents

Agents are the AI employees that make up your Paperclip company. They're where the work actually happens: the CEO setting strategy, the engineer shipping code, the marketer drafting posts. Everything else in Paperclip — tasks, approvals, skills, budgets — exists to coordinate and govern what your agents do.

Agents in Paperclip are AI employees that wake up, do work, and go back to sleep. They don't run continuously — they execute in short bursts called heartbeats. Between heartbeats the agent is dormant: it consumes no budget, holds no context in memory, and takes no action. A heartbeat is triggered by something concrete (a schedule, a mention, an assignment, a manual invoke), the adapter brings the agent runtime online just long enough to make progress, and then the agent exits and the adapter records what happened.

This guide walks through the entire agent surface in Paperclip: the list page you land on when you click Agents, the flow for hiring a new one, and every tab on the agent detail page. If you're new to Paperclip, read this top to bottom. If you're here to change one specific thing — a budget limit, a model, an instruction file — jump to the matching tab section.

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The Agent List

The agent list is the front door. Open Agents in the sidebar and you land on /agents/all.

!Agent list (/uploads/content/2026/04/359fecbb-9805-4d67-91ae-3cfba845b056.webp)

Filter tabs

Four tabs across the top scope what you see: