Compass — Paperclip Plugin

Strategic consultant for AI company lifecycle — found, assess, revive, reposition.

Compass is a Paperclip plugin that acts as a strategic consultant for any Paperclip-hosted AI company at any lifecycle stage. It founds new companies, audits existing ones, revives stalled ones, and repositions mature ones — all from inside Paperclip's plugin sidebar with no separate Claude Code session, SSH, or shell scripting required.

Table of Contents

• What is Compass?
• The Four Modes
• Quick Start
• How to Use Compass
• In-App Help
• Installation
• Development
• Contributing

What is Compass?

Every AI-run company in Paperclip goes through a lifecycle: it gets founded, runs for a while, sometimes stalls, sometimes pivots. Compass meets a company wherever it is in that lifecycle and routes you to the right workflow.

Compass detects which mode your company is in (deterministic rules, no LLM tax for classification) and presents the matching consultant interface. You can always override the detected mode if you want to run a different workflow.

Every change Compass makes is written natively into Paperclip — VISION documents, agent briefings, issues, comments, scheduled wakeups. You never leave the sidebar.

The Four Modes

| Mode | When | What it does | |---|---|---| | Found ✨ | No VISION.md exists yet | Walks you through the 6-section vision quest interview, generates VISION.md, provisions agents per the preset you choose, files kickoff issues, and queues the first wakeups. | | Assess 🔍 | Healthy company with recent activity | Compares VISION.md against the last 30 days of agent activity, scores drift per section, proposes amendments. You approve, reject, or edit each one. | | Revive ⚠️ | Company has stalled | Runs a stall classifier (single-agent failure / governance loop / dead agent / drift), groups blockers by root cause, queues unblocking actions for your approval. | | Reposition ↻ | Healthy company, founder wants to pivot | Re-runs scoped vision quest on just the deltas you describe, produces an amendment diff, generates a cascade plan (which agents need rebriefing, which content needs rewriting). |

Compass picks one of these four modes for you on plugin open. The dropdown in the top-right lets you override.

Quick Start

1. Install the plugin (see Installation below).
2. Open a company in Paperclip.
3. Click "Compass" in the sidebar.
4. Read the welcome card that appears on first visit — it explains the four modes inline. Dismiss when you're ready.
5. Look at the mode banner at the top: Compass shows which mode it picked and a one-line copy explaining why.
6. Click the ? icons next to any heading to get inline help on what that section does.
7. Drive the workflow — every primary action button has a hover tooltip explaining what it does and what happens after.

That's it. The plugin walks you through.

How to Use Compass

First time on a brand-new company → Found mode

You'll see the vision quest interview — six sections covering Big Picture, Revenue & Customers, Growth & Marketing, Product Direction, CEO Autonomy, and Vision & Identity. Answer what you can, skip what you can't (questions are optional unless required for the agents you want to provision).

When you reach the end, Compass renders a preview of the VISION it'll write. Edit anything inline. When you click Confirm & Apply, you get one final confirmation modal — only after you confirm does Compass write VISION.md, provision agents, file kickoff issues, and queue the first wakeups.

Coming back to a healthy company → Assess mode

Click "Run a drift audit" in the header. Compass loads the last 30 days of activity, compares each VISION section against actual work, and renders a drift report.

For each amendment Compass proposes, you can:

• Accept — flag for application
• Reject — mark and skip
• Edit — tweak the proposed text

Click Apply N accepted amendments when you're done. Approval-gated changes route to the configured approver (founder / founder+ceo / configurable per-company in plugin settings).

Coming back to a quiet company → Revive mode

You'll see a stall summary at the top: how many days no activity, how many open blockers. Click "Find what's blocking this company". Compass runs the stall classifier and renders an action queue grouped by root cause.

For each action, dismiss it if it doesn't apply. When you've triaged the queue, click Review and apply to queue the surviving actions.

Pivoting strategy → Reposition mode

Override the dropdown to "Pivot strategy". Describe the strategic shift in plain English ("we're moving from B2C to B2B" / "we're dropping the freemium tier" / etc).

Compass infers which VISION sections the shift touches and re-asks only those questions. You get an amendment diff plus a cascade plan showing which agents need rebriefing and which content needs rewriting. Approve each amendment individually before anything is written.

In-App Help

Compass ships with progressive-disclosure help everywhere:

• ? icons next to every section heading — click for plain-English explanation, with a "Learn more" expander for technical detail
• Hover tooltips on every primary action button — explains what the action does and what happens after
• Per-option tooltips on the mode dropdown — hover any option to see what it does
• First-run welcome card — explains the four modes inline; dismissible per company
• "Why?" link next to the mode dropdown — explains how detection works

If you're stuck, the inline help is designed to answer your question without leaving the sidebar.

Installation

npm Registry (recommended)

# In your Paperclip host:
paperclip plugins install paperclip-plugin-compass

Or via the Paperclip plugin manager UI, search for paperclip-plugin-compass.

Pinned version

paperclip plugins install paperclip-plugin-compass --version 0.3.0

Local Development

Clone the repo and install from a local path:

paperclip plugins install file:///path/to/paperclip-plugin-compass --local

Development

pnpm install      # install deps
pnpm dev          # watch-mode rebuild
pnpm test         # vitest watch
pnpm test:run     # vitest run once
pnpm typecheck    # tsc --noEmit
pnpm build        # esbuild → dist/

The Paperclip host auto-restarts the plugin worker on bundle changes (no manual reload required).

Credits

Built with the strategic interview depth from aronprins/paperclip-vision.

Plugin chassis adapted from yesterday-ai/paperclip-plugin-company-wizard.

Co-maintained with Aron Prins.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for local dev setup, testing, and PR conventions. See DECISIONS.md for major design decisions.

License

MIT — See LICENSE for details.

Questions?

Open an issue or ping the maintainers listed in CODEOWNERS.