Running an AI Company With One npx Command — Dissecting the paperclip.ing Architecture
Running an AI Company With One npx Command — Dissecting the paperclip.ing Architecture The previous piece spent a long time walking through the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment and the reward-hacking problem in LLM agents. At the end, I mentioned — somewhat ironically — that a project has shown up carrying this exact name. That project is the subject of this piece. paperclip.ing . The official GitHub lives at github.com/paperclipai/paperclip . As of April 2026 it's sitting at roughly 57k stars, and version numbers look like v2026.416.0 — date-based releases. Installation is one line. npx paperclipai onboard --yes Run that, and an embedded PostgreSQL spins up locally while an interactive setup walks you through standing up your first "company." From that point on, you don't chat with an AI. You run a company. Taking the Name Head-On Calling the project Paperclip isn't wordplay. It's a deliberate reference to Nick Bostrom's 2003 thought exp...