Paperclip is a Node.js server and React application for coordinating AI agents as a business team, with goals, organizational roles, budgets, governance, and work tracking in one interface. It is used by people managing multiple agents or autonomous agent organizations across tools such as OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. The catalogue includes skills, agents, an MCP add-on, and an instruction for working with Paperclip.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to paperclipai/paperclip. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paperclipai/paperclip/master/.agents/skills/diagnose-why-work-stopped/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclipWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/paperclipai/paperclip/diagnose-why-work-stopped)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paperclipai/paperclip/diagnose-why-work-stopped"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paperclipai/paperclip/diagnose-why-work-stopped/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paperclipai/paperclip/diagnose-why-work-stopped"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paperclipai/paperclip/diagnose-why-work-stopped.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00054 | $0.02635 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00027 | $0.01318 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00527 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00264 |
Grade A, and why
diagnose-why-work-stopped scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Diagnose Why Work Stopped
A repeatable procedure for the recurring class of issues where the user (or a manager) points at a stalled / looping / over-recovered issue tree and asks "why did this stop / why is this looping / how do we make sure this doesn't happen again?"
This skill is diagnostic + product-design, not engineering. The output is a written root cause and an approved plan. No code changes leave this skill.
Canonical execution model: read doc/execution-semantics.md before diagnosing or proposing a new liveness/recovery rule. Use that document as the source of truth for status, action-path, post-run disposition, bounded continuation, productivity review, pause-hold, watchdog, and explicit recovery semantics. If the investigation finds a true product-rule gap, the plan should say whether doc/execution-semantics.md needs a matching update.
When to use
Trigger on an assignment whose title or body matches any of:
- "why did this work stop", "why did this stall", "why did this just stop"
- "infinite loop", "looping", "spinning", "going too deep", "recovery went too deep"
- "liveness — what happened here", "this tree stopped working", "stuck"
- "approach it from a product perspective", "general product principle / rule"
- An attached link to a specific stalled / looping / over-recovered issue tree
Also use when the user asks for forensics, root cause, or a write-up before any product change.
When NOT to use
- The assignment asks you to ship a code change directly. Use normal engineering flow.
- The assignment is a normal bug report against a specific feature. Use normal investigation.
- You are the original implementer being asked to fix your own bug. Use normal debugging.
Three invariants you must preserve
Every diagnosis and every proposed rule must hold these three invariants together. The user has restated them on at least four issues; treat them as load-bearing:
- Productive work continues. Agents that have a clear next action must keep working without needing the user to wake them. (PAP-2674, PAP-2708)
- Only real blockers stop work. Stops happen when something genuinely cannot proceed (missing approval, missing dependency, human owner). Pseudo-stops (in_review with no action path, cancelled leaves, malformed metadata) must be detected and routed, not left silent. (PAP-2335, PAP-2674)
- No infinite loops. Stranded-work recovery and continuation loops must be bounded and distinguishable from genuinely productive continuation. (PAP-2602, PAP-2486)
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 12d ago First seen · 158 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A ded60e799a3f
diagnose-why-work-stopped is a skill published in the GitHub repository paperclipai/paperclip (80,385 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,635 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
systemic-issue-triage
Trigger: new issue, bug report, triage, backlog, issue flood, community report, root cause, dead-end, blocked user. Attack issues by root class, never one-by-one; fixes must shrink the system, not grow it.
triage-issue
Intelligently triage bug reports and error messages by searching for duplicates in Jira and offering to create new issues or add comments to existing ones. When an agent needs to: (1) Triage a bug report or error message, (2) Check if an issue is a duplicate, (3) Find similar past issues, (4) Create a new bug ticket…
bug-triage
Read all open bugs in production/qa/bugs/, re-evaluate priority vs. severity, assign to sprints, surface systemic trends, and produce a triage report. Run at sprint start or when the bug count grows enough to need re-prioritization.
investigation
Create an investigation ticket + live-doc for sustained root-cause work (retros, bug archaeology, regression hunts).
browse-flows
Browse Power Automate environments and flows interactively. Use when the user wants to browse, list, or explore their flows and environments.
operating-cadence
Designs the rhythm an organization runs on — which reviews happen weekly, monthly and quarterly, what each one decides, who owns the numbers presented, and how a signal at the front line reaches the people who can act on it. Use this to set up a management operating system, fix a meeting calendar that produces no…