Migrating a Manual Workflow

Migrating a Manual Workflow to Paperclip

A workflow migration done well is invisible — after it's complete, the work still happens, quality stays consistent, and you're just less involved in the execution. Done badly, it produces an AI company that's busy in ways you don't understand, outputs that don't match expectations, and a general sense that the agents are doing something, but not quite the right thing.

The difference is almost always in the preparation. Before moving a workflow into Paperclip, you need to understand the workflow well enough to describe it precisely. Most people discover during this process that they didn't understand their own workflow as well as they thought.

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When migration makes sense (and when it doesn't)

Migration is worth the setup effort when the workflow is:

Repeating. The same sequence of steps runs again and again — weekly reports, regular publishing, recurring development cycles. Articulable. You can describe what good output looks like, not just recognise it when you see it. Tolerant of iteration. The first few cycles won't be perfect. If a single imperfect output causes serious harm, the workflow needs more human involvement, not less.

Migration is premature when:

You've only run the workflow a few times and the steps are still evolving. The quality bar is highly subjective and varies each time by judgment calls you can't write down. The workflow depends heavily on real-time information you don't currently have a way to feed to agents.

A hybrid approach — where agents handle the repeatable parts and you handle the judgment calls — is often more durable than trying to automate everything at once.