Working reference setup for Paperclip agents?

Abdul · 2026-05-18

Hey @dotta — curious question about Paperclip AI.

Is there a reason you haven’t shared a working reference setup for agents/company structure?

I’ve tried several times to set up a company and agents, but my results haven’t worked as smoothly as Paperclip promises. I think a lot of us would really benefit from seeing what a “correct” setup looks like — even a simple example with agent roles, responsibilities, prompts, and how tasks should flow.

Not asking for private/internal secrets, just a practical reference setup so the community can understand the intended pattern better.

Answers

Abdul · 2026-05-18

Thanks for replying @aronprins

Aron Prins · 2026-05-18

Fair feedback, and a recurring request. The published reference setups live at [paperclip.community/companies](https://paperclip.community/companies) — real org charts, real agent prompts, real starter tasks, importable as-is. Worth starting from the smallest one (a solo dev shop, or one of the niche-site templates) rather than a complex multi-role org, because the failure modes you're describing usually come from rosters that are too large rather than too small. I just posted a longer response on your experiment thread that goes into the specific patterns to copy from those references — let's continue the conversation there: /threads/experiment-report-building-a-software-dev-company-in-paperclip (/threads/experiment-report-building-a-software-dev-company-in-paperclip).

Two things that are genuinely missing today and that you're right to flag:

Imported companies don't surface their README anywhere in the UI after import — so even when a template ships a "getting-started" section, you have to dig for it. That's a real UX gap and on the roadmap. The agentcompanies/v1 schema doesn't require a README field. Until that's enforced, template quality varies between contributors.

If a specific reference template let you down, point me at it and I'll go look at what's missing.