projects / paperclip-company-desk
A clockwork owl connects a paper task board to orchestration terminals through an auditable brass desk.
INFRASTRUCTURE ·

Paperclip Company Desk

A bounded operator bridge between desktop agent chats, the Catalyst Paperclip company, and Orca—with preview-first writes, explicit unknown outcomes, and read-back receipts.

Overview

Paperclip Company Desk is the narrow front door between an operator conversation and the Catalyst agent company. Paperclip remains the durable system of record; a chat session can disappear without taking the work history, current assignment, or final receipt with it.

The desk exposes a small command grammar for standups, pending work, resumptions, issue submission, assignment, wakeups, comments, and interaction answers. It is deliberately not a general remote-control shell.

Preview first, then prove the write

Every mutation is previewed unless the caller explicitly applies it. Stable request IDs prevent the same intent from becoming two tasks, and each applied operation is read back before the client calls it successful.

The most important state is unknown. If a timeout or network loss leaves the result unverifiable, the desk does not optimistically retry and does not manufacture a success receipt. The operator reconciles that operation before deciding what should happen next.

A private SQLite ledger stores operation state locally. Credentials stay host-specific, and the current pilot confines mutations to one bounded task subtree.

Orca companion

A separate Paperclip Orca plugin gives approved Paperclip agents read-only visibility into Orca runtime readiness, worktrees, and orchestration runs. Its first phase does not dispatch workers. That boundary keeps “can inspect the execution fabric” separate from “can start work on it.”

Status

Active pilot, internal tooling. The client builds and is exercised from both the Mac Studio and Owlforge with separate credentials. The Orca plugin has proven its registered tool path through Paperclip’s official execution route. Neither component is presented as a public hosted product.