I got myself a Rabbit R1 for my birthday, and I wanted to see how well it could coordinate agents while I was away from my desk. So I tried OpenClaw, the open-source agent framework that lit a fire under the agentic AI space earlier this year. In February its creator, Peter Steinberger, joined OpenAI, and Sam Altman said OpenClaw would "live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support." In June Microsoft announced Scout, a personal agent for Microsoft 365 built on it. It's definitely one to watch.
For me it was a lot of trouble for what it was worth. Hooking it up and making it work turned into engineering for engineering's sake: making sure things were running, making sure subscriptions were working in the R1, and a lot of jury-rigging. It wasn't worth the time, because work wasn't getting done. In September I moved the OpenClaw gateway from my Linux workstation to my Mac mini. Things kept rebooting, and machines were hitting their limits. On 28 September I spun up a new VPS at Hetzner to host it, and that didn't work either. The next day, after a reboot, the gateway I had retired on the Mac mini started up again without my noticing. I deleted the server on 1 October and uninstalled OpenClaw the next day.
What I still wanted was something that would help me see all my tasks and projects, and take the load off my Mac mini. So I went back to Paperclip, which describes itself as a way to "orchestrate AI agent teams to run a business." I tried it last year and it wasn't quite there yet for me. After a week of going back and forth and tweaking it, it's getting a lot better. It runs on my Linux box, and on 4 October I moved all 515 of my open tasks onto its board.
It's much more visual for me. I can see where all my projects are, assign them to agents, see where they're going with them, and pause things where they are. I'm not only using it for software development. I'm using it for a little bit of everything, because as a solo business owner running consulting, web development and software development, I need all of it in one space where I can see it and know where things are. I don't necessarily want an AI agent calling me up and telling me stuff. I don't care about the magic that makes it look cool. I need a centralised place where it all lives.
It's been a little bumpy, but less bumpy than before. I'm learning that not every subscription I pay for works here. I can't use Antigravity or Gemini in Paperclip, and that's fine, because they have their uses in other places. For someone on the higher-tier ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions, it's quite good. It's helping me balance my work and find out where to hand things off. I spend more of my time talking to Claude Code and having it hand out the tasks and help me prioritise.
There are tools that can help you manage your projects in natural language and sit with you while you work. If you have a reasonably powerful computer, you can install Paperclip and run it locally. And as I always say, ask it what it can do. Ask the hammer what it's capable of.