routines

Routines — Recurring Agent Tasks

Routines are Paperclip's scheduling primitive. Instead of agents burning tokens on timer heartbeats polling for work, routines fire only when needed — on a cron schedule, webhook, or explicit API call — and create a targeted heartbeat run for the assigned agent.

Why Routines > Always-On Heartbeats

Approach	Token cost	Responsiveness
Heartbeat every 5 min	~288 runs/day, most idle	High but wasteful
Routines (cron + webhook)	Only fires when scheduled or triggered	Same responsiveness, fraction of the cost

The key insight: clean up heartbeats = token reducing = cheaper.

Quick Start

1. Find your IDs

# Company ID
curl -s "$PAPERCLIP_API_URL/api/agents/me" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERCLIP_API_KEY" | jq '.companyId, .id'

# Agents in company
curl -s "$PAPERCLIP_API_URL/api/companies/{companyId}/agents" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERCLIP_API_KEY" | jq '.[] | {id, name, role}'

# Projects
curl -s "$PAPERCLIP_API_URL/api/companies/{companyId}/projects" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERCLIP_API_KEY" | jq '.[] | {id, name}'

2. Create a routine

curl -s -X POST "$PAPERCLIP_API_URL/api/companies/{companyId}/routines" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERCLIP_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Daily standup check",
    "description": "CEO reviews all in_progress issues and nudges stalled agents",
    "assigneeAgentId": "{ceo-agent-id}",
    "projectId": "{project-id}",
    "priority": "medium",
    "status": "active",
    "concurrencyPolicy": "skip_if_active",
    "catchUpPolicy": "skip_missed"
  }'

3. Add a cron trigger

curl -s -X POST "$PAPERCLIP_API_URL/api/routines/{routineId}/triggers" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PAPERCLIP_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "kind": "schedule",
    "cronExpression": "0 9 * * 1-5",
    "timezone": "Europe/Amsterdam"
  }'