It’s a bit clique these days to have YouTube thumbnails accompanied with a portrait of yourself looking shocked and astonished. It has however, proven to be very effective at drawing followers for some.
So you’ll forgive me for the clique image of me looking shocked and astonished.
In saying that, I WAS genuinely shocked and astonished when I gave paperclip.ing a spin recently.
For those not familiar with paperclip.ing, they describe their platform as:
“The human control plane for AI labor”
‘Hire AI employees, set goals, automate jobs and your business runs itself’.
Sounds a little vague, ‘a human control plane’ but conceptually you get a picture. Then it gets interesting.
‘….for AI Labor’.
A dashboard for AI Labor – a company of agents that run your business?
They state it’s a one command instalL
npx paperclipai onboard — yes
They weren’t telling porkies. This assumes your root dir is npx ready of course but that’s a quick fix if not. And that’s as technical as it gets if you want to keep it simple.
You run through a wizard which picks up your local or remote auth variables automatically, for either Claude or CODEX. I’ll be honest, this felt a little scary, but I was able to edit them before committing to an API token or connect to a subscription that the app selected on my behalf.
It turned out this was important! I was about to employ a pay as you go workforce, only these workers work 24/7, don’t need breaks, teach themselves new skills and talk with other workers like you do at the watercooler.
I had the desktop UI up and running within 10-15 mins proceeded to add a CEO – that’s me – the human in the loop. Then I made the mistake many will, I approved the CEO to hire a layer of executive management agents under me: Full C-Suite, Legal Counsel, HR and Project Management.
I gave Project Management the lead, to build a strategy, collaborating with the other executive and deliver a plan starting with research:
“Find the top 10 Methods of Making Income with an Agentic workforce”.
Then I pressed run.
About an hour later my ChatGPT daily limit of 5 hours of CODEX use blew up and it wasn’t hard to see why. My exec team were literally creating a company and producing a prototype of the proposed solution.
The hiring process was comprehensive, intensive interview regimes, candidate testing and case studies and presentations. Meetings, analysis, budgets, contracts, all bundled up in a neat little approval workflow for me, driving the Human Plane:
Approve hire?
Of course! Go right ahead, you’re doing great work.
Approve, approve, approve….keep going!
What happened next was mind boggling. Four of my agents were MIA, CEO was – ‘Idle’, CFO, COO, CIO – all ‘Idle’. They were blocked by dependent tasks, waiting for other things to happen.
The rest marched on toward a checkpoint I had thankfully created – deliver an MVP prototype. They were on track to deliver when they ran out of fuel.
What they achieved in that small time was staggering. Emails. Documents. Code. Decisions. And almost a prototype.
That’s where I stopped, somewhat relieved my 5-hour rolling limit was blown for the day. No harm done.
Licking my wounds I walked away and started planning v2.
The secret here is to be careful, you have to set strong boundaries in scope and ensure the agents have checkpoints to stop them getting too far ahead because they will. That causes problems with dependent tasks and token use.
It’s a lot to take in but it’s clear that this is well engineered. It installs easily and doesn’t break for no good reason.
My Agentic workforce has now been scaled down and works in controlled bursts. Stay tuned, there’s more to come from this experiment.
Written by: Mike G Robinson
Mike is a qualified Accountant and IT Risk Management specialist and has consulted enterprises in Australia and NZ in Risk Framework development, implementation and operation eventually moving into SAP FI and Data Migration and Project Management. See Mike’s profile.
See my website: MGRNZ.com
If you’re interested in adopting AI safely into your business, book a 20-minute chat with Mike.
Go to My Services Page: What I’m Building
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