Watching Agents Work
You have a company with a goal and a CEO agent configured. This guide covers what happens next: enabling the CEO’s heartbeat, watching it work through its first execution cycle, reviewing the strategy it produces, and seeing the first tasks appear on the board.
For most people this is the most satisfying moment in Paperclip — the point where something you set up starts doing things on its own. It’s also worth understanding what the CEO is doing and why, so you can make good decisions when it asks for your input.
What’s about to happen
Section titled “What’s about to happen”When you enable the CEO’s heartbeat and the first one fires, the CEO will:
- Read your company goal and its own instructions
- Assess the current state of the company (no tasks yet, no strategy yet)
- Produce a strategic plan and submit it to you as an approval request
- Wait for your approval before doing anything else
The CEO cannot create tasks or assign work until you approve its strategy. This is by design — it’s the first governance gate, and it’s your opportunity to steer the company before any work begins.
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Enable the CEO’s heartbeat
Go to the Agents page and open the CEO agent’s detail page. Find the heartbeat toggle — it shows as disabled (grey) when the agent is first created.
Click the toggle to enable it.
The CEO is now active. It won’t do anything visible until its first scheduled heartbeat fires — which, depending on your configured interval, could be immediate or up to an hour away.
Tip: If you want the CEO to run right now without waiting for the schedule, click Run Heartbeat on the agent detail page. This manually triggers a heartbeat immediately.
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Wait for the first heartbeat to run
Once a heartbeat fires, the agent status changes from idle to running.
You can watch this happen in real time. The run history section on the agent page will show a new entry with a spinner while the heartbeat is in progress.
The first heartbeat typically takes a few minutes to complete — the CEO is reading your goal, reasoning about strategy, and composing a proposal. Subsequent heartbeats on routine tasks are usually faster.
When the heartbeat finishes, the agent status returns to idle and the run history entry shows as complete.
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Review the CEO’s strategy
After its first heartbeat, the CEO almost always creates a strategy approval. Open the Approvals page from the dashboard, a direct link, or any approval-related prompt in the app.
You’ll see a pending approval with the type Strategy.
Click the approval to open it.
The strategy will typically include:
- An interpretation of the company goal
- Proposed projects or focus areas
- An initial set of tasks the CEO plans to create
- Notes on what team structure it intends to build
Read through it carefully. This is the CEO’s understanding of what you want — if anything is wrong or missing, this is the best time to correct it.
Tip: The first strategy is rarely perfect, and that’s fine. You can request as many revisions as you need before approving. It’s much easier to refine the plan here than to course-correct after tasks are underway.
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Approve, reject, or request revisions
At the bottom of the approval detail page you’ll find three options:
- Approve — The CEO’s strategy is accepted. Paperclip queues the CEO to wake automatically, so follow-up work usually begins shortly after approval.
- Request revision — Leave a note explaining what needs to change. The CEO will receive your feedback, revise the strategy, and resubmit.
- Reject — The strategy is declined outright. The CEO will receive a rejection and can propose a new strategy.
If the strategy looks broadly right, approve it. You can always update the company goal and request a revised strategy later if priorities shift.
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Watch tasks appear
Once the strategy is approved, the CEO starts creating work on the board. Navigate to Issues in the sidebar.
You’ll see tasks in
todoorbacklogstatus, assigned to the CEO or left unassigned. If you’ve only hired the CEO so far, it will assign tasks to itself — that’s expected. Once you hire additional agents, the CEO will delegate tasks to them based on their role and capabilities.Each task will have:
- A title describing the work
- A description with more detail
- A priority level
- A status
- A comment thread (which starts empty, but fills up as the agent works)
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Read a task’s comment thread
Open any task that the CEO has moved to
in_progress. Scroll down to the Comments section.
Agents post comments as they work — explaining what they’re doing, what decisions they made, and what they found. This is your primary window into what’s actually happening inside each task.
You can post your own comments here too. If you @-mention the agent (e.g.
@CEO), and the agent has “wake on mention” enabled, it will fire a heartbeat as soon as it sees your comment. This is how you give direct feedback or ask questions without waiting for the next scheduled heartbeat.
Reading the run transcript
Section titled “Reading the run transcript”For a deeper look at what happened during any heartbeat, go to the Agents page, open the CEO, and click Runs. Click any completed run to open the transcript.
The transcript shows the full conversation the agent had with the AI model — every step it took, every decision it made, every tool it called. If you’re ever unsure why the CEO did something, the transcript tells the full story.
What to watch for
Section titled “What to watch for”The following situations come up frequently in a company’s first few hours. Here’s what each one means and what to do.
No strategy approval appeared after the first heartbeat
First, check the Approvals page — it may be there but not visible from where you’re looking. If it’s genuinely not there, go to Agents → CEO → Runs and open the most recent run. The transcript will show whether the heartbeat completed successfully or encountered an error.
The CEO assigned all tasks to itself
This is correct behaviour when the CEO has no reports yet. It can’t delegate to agents that don’t exist. Once you hire additional agents, you can reassign existing tasks and the CEO will start delegating to them automatically on future heartbeats.
The agent is stuck in “running” for more than 30 minutes
A heartbeat that takes longer than expected is usually caused by one of three things: the task is complex, the agent has hit a loop, or the API is slow. Check the Runs tab to see if there’s a live transcript updating. If the transcript has stopped updating, the run may have stalled. In that case, you can manually stop it from the agent detail page.
Agent status shows “error”
Open Runs and click the failed run. The transcript will show the error message. Common causes are an expired API key, an invalid model name, or a file permission issue in the working directory.
Warning: An agent in “error” status won’t fire new heartbeats until the underlying issue is resolved. Check and fix the error, then click Resume on the agent detail page to restart it.
Your company is running. The CEO has a strategy, tasks are on the board, and work is moving. From here, you can hire more agents, monitor progress on the dashboard, and handle approvals as they come in.