Whatever You Connect, Your Agents Can Use
Adapters are passthroughs. Whatever CLI, MCP, plugin, or skill you install on the host becomes available to every Paperclip agent that runs there — given the right instruction. With detailed examples for gh, gogcli, slackrawl and more.
Whatever You Connect, Your Agents Can Use
The most underused property of a Paperclip company is also the simplest one. If a tool is installed and reachable from the same shell your adapter runs in, your agents can use it. There is no separate integration layer, no plugin marketplace to wait on, no special "Paperclip-aware" build of the CLI. The adapter is a passthrough. Anything you would type into a terminal, an agent can type instead — given the right instruction and the right context.
This is easy to read past, because every individual tool is unremarkable. The point is the cumulative effect: every CLI, MCP, plugin, or skill you install on the host quietly extends the capability surface of every agent that runs there. Your operator environment becomes their operator environment.
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The mental model
An adapter is a sandbox plus a shell. Whatever the adapter can run, your agent can invoke. The instruction is what tells it which tool to reach for and what to do with the output.
| Surface | What "available" means | |---|---| | CLI on $PATH | The adapter can shell out to it directly. Output comes back as text the agent can parse, summarise, or pipe further. | | MCP server | Registered with the adapter (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc.). Tools become callable structured operations with typed arguments. | | Plugin / Skill | A capability bundle the adapter loads at startup. Often wraps a CLI or an MCP, with prompt-side guidance for when to use it. | | Editor / IDE integration | Claude Code, Codex CLI, Aider, OpenCode — already adapter-native. |
The four surfaces converge on the same point: if it's installed where the agent runs, it's reachable. The only remaining question is whether the agent knows it exists and when to use it.
> Tip: Every Paperclip adapter inherits the host's $PATH. Installing a CLI globally on the machine — brew install gh, npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code, go install ... — makes it available to every agent on that adapter. You do not need to "register" a CLI with Paperclip.
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