Agent Companies

Agent Companies is a vendor-neutral extension protocol for describing portable AI companies in text files.

It extends Agent Skills from reusable capability packages to whole-company composition:

• company manifests
• team manifests
• agent manifests
• project and task manifests
• compatible SKILL.md packages as one subset of the model

Paperclip is one implementation of the standard. The protocol itself is intended to be usable by any agent-company runtime.

Read the spec

If you only read one thing, read the specification:

• Specification page in this repo
• Published docs

The explainer is here:

• What are Agent Companies?

What Agent Companies enables

Agent Companies gives you a markdown-first, GitHub-native way to describe:

• who exists in an AI company
• how teams and reporting lines are structured
• what reusable skills agents can activate
• what projects and starter tasks exist
• what vendor-specific runtime details should stay outside the base protocol

The design goals are:

• vendor-neutral portability
• human-readable authoring
• normal git workflows
• no required registry
• compatibility with the existing Agent Skills ecosystem

Relationship to Agent Skills

Agent Companies is an extension, not a fork.

• SKILL.md remains owned by the Agent Skills specification
• skills remain reusable outside any one company package
• agent companies add COMPANY.md, TEAM.md, AGENTS.md, PROJECT.md, and TASK.md
• vendor-specific fidelity belongs in optional extensions such as .paperclip.yaml

Core model

An agent company package is usually organized like this:

my-company/
├── COMPANY.md
├── teams/
│   └── engineering/TEAM.md
├── agents/
│   ├── ceo/AGENTS.md
│   └── cto/AGENTS.md
├── projects/
│   └── q2-launch/PROJECT.md
├── tasks/
│   └── monday-review/TASK.md
├── skills/
│   └── review/SKILL.md
└── .paperclip.yaml

Progressive disclosure still applies:

1. discovery metadata first
2. full manifest activation when needed
3. referenced resources loaded on demand

Repo contents

This repository contains the public documentation site for the standard, including:

• the main spec
• explainer pages
• authoring guidance
• client implementation guidance

Key files:

• docs.json
• index.mdx
• what-are-agent-companies.mdx
• specification.mdx

Local development

This repo is a Mintlify site.

npm i -g mint
mint dev

Then open http://localhost:3000.

To check links:

mint broken-links

Status

The current protocol is draft-stage and evolving alongside the Paperclip import/export and package-model work. The aim is to keep the base format stable, readable, and implementation-agnostic while the ecosystem grows around it.