How to check on Paperclip from your phone
Paperclip does not run continuously. It wakes on a schedule, does a batch of work, and goes quiet again - often while you are nowhere near your Mac.
Paperclip is the open-source dashboard for running a team of AI agents like a small company: you assign goals, set a budget per agent, and it tracks what got done and what it cost. It is a Node server with a React dashboard, and it is self-hosted only - there is no cloud version, so both pieces run on your Mac.
The part that matters for this article is how the agents actually run. Paperclip does not keep an agent thinking all day. Instead it wakes each one on a heartbeat - commonly every 4, 8 or 12 hours - checks its task queue, hands it context, enforces its budget, and lets it work. Then it goes idle again until the next heartbeat.
The problem this creates
A heartbeat every few hours means the interesting moments do not line up with you sitting at your desk. Your agent picks up a task at 2pm while you are in a meeting, or at 6am while you are asleep. By the time you sit back down, it already ran, spent part of its budget, and maybe hit something it needs you to look at.
The dashboard that shows all of this lives in a browser tab, on the Mac that is hosting Paperclip. That is exactly the wrong shape for a tool whose whole design is to work without you watching it. A dashboard you can only open from the machine it runs on is a dashboard you check once a day, at best.
What "checking in" actually needs
Three things, roughly in order of how often you need each one:
- Seeing the dashboard. Which agents ran, what they did, what they spent against budget.
- Reading what an agent actually produced - a file, a draft, a log - not just a summary line.
- Stepping in when something needs a human decision the agent could not make on its own.
None of that requires a second computer. It requires seeing the screen of the one Paperclip is already running on, from wherever you happen to be.
Screen mirror plus a real trackpad
MightyMouse turns your iPhone into a screen, trackpad and mic for your Mac, over your own network or a tunnel when you are off it, so it is not a separate service Paperclip has to know about - it is just your Mac, on your phone.
Open the phone remote, pull up the mirror, and you are looking at the same Paperclip dashboard that is on your Mac's screen: which agent ran on the last heartbeat, what it cost, whether anything failed. If a run left something worth reading in full - a draft, a log, a diff - the trackpad gives you an actual pointer to scroll and click with, which a screenshot or a status email cannot.
And if the agent needs a real decision - raise the budget, redirect the goal, kill a run that went sideways - you have the same keyboard and pointer you would have sitting at the desk, not a cut-down mobile view of a React app that was never built for a small screen.
What this is not
MightyMouse does not talk to Paperclip directly, does not read its task queue, and is not a supported backend for it. Paperclip orchestrates the agents; MightyMouse gets you to the Mac Paperclip is running on. Those are two different layers, and it is worth being precise about that rather than implying an integration that does not exist.
The honest tradeoff
This only solves being away from the desk, not away from the machine. Paperclip runs on your Mac, so your Mac has to be on and reachable for any of this to work - closing the lid on a MacBook that is not set to stay awake ends the heartbeat, mirror or no mirror. And a phone screen is still a phone screen: fine for checking status and stepping in on something small, worse than a real monitor for reading a long diff line by line.
What you get for that: you stop being the reason a heartbeat sits idle for six hours because nobody saw what it needed.
See your Mac, from your phone, wherever the heartbeat catches you.
Free local voice transcription either way. No card to try it.
Common questions
Can I run Paperclip on my phone instead of my Mac?
No. Paperclip is a self-hosted Node server and React dashboard, and it is not built to run on iOS. What you can do is see and control the Mac it is already running on, from your phone.
Does MightyMouse work with Paperclip specifically?
There is no direct integration - MightyMouse does not talk to Paperclip's task queue or agents. What it gives you is your Mac's screen, trackpad and keyboard on your phone, which happens to be exactly what you need to check a dashboard that only runs on your Mac.
Do I need to be on the same Wi-Fi as my Mac to check on it?
No. MightyMouse connects over your own network when you are on it and falls back to a tunnel when you are not, so you can check in from outside the house too.
How do I know when a Paperclip agent actually needs me?
Paperclip itself does not push you a phone notification - you would check the dashboard on your own schedule, or on Paperclip's own alerting if it has one configured. MightyMouse's part is making that dashboard reachable and usable once you decide to look.
If your agents keep working on a heartbeat while you are away from your desk: MightyMouse puts your Mac, and whatever is running on it, on your phone.