Moving Your Paperclip Company to a Server

Moving Your Paperclip Company to a Server

A Paperclip company that lives on your laptop has one fundamental constraint: it only works when the laptop does. Close the lid, lose the network, fly somewhere — and the agents stop. For an experiment that's fine. For an AI company that's supposed to keep working when you don't, it's a ceiling.

Moving your company off your laptop is a one-evening project if you've already exported once. The export/import flow was built precisely for this. This guide walks through the practical shape of the move — picking where to host, getting the new instance up, importing your company, restoring the parts that don't travel in the package, and confirming nothing's broken before you turn off the laptop.

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When to make the move

The signal is usually one of these:

Your laptop's heartbeats are firing inconsistently because you sleep it overnight or work offline. You want agents to keep making progress when you're away from the machine. You've outgrown the sandbox phase and the goal is real — losing days of work to a closed lid is no longer acceptable. You want to share the instance with collaborators on a private network, which localtrusted doesn't support.

If you're still iterating heavily on agent instructions and adapter configurations, stay local. The export/import flow is fast and re-runnable, but each migration has setup cost. Move once you have a configuration you trust.

> Tip: Run a full export once before you migrate anyway, even if you're not ready to move. It's the cheapest backup you can take, and it makes the eventual migration a re-run rather than a first-run.

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