Shared agents, skills, and routines across multiple companies (with per-company overrides)

[gruviimark]

Shared agents, skills, and routines across multiple companies (with per-company overrides)

The problem

Each company on a Paperclip instance is completely separate, so anything I want to reuse has to be rebuilt by hand in every company and kept in sync by hand. If I want the same capability in several companies, I build it multiple times and maintain it multiple times. Improve it once and I have to remember to copy that change everywhere. With two companies it's a nuisance. With five it's real work, and pieces quietly fall out of sync.

Here's what I'd most want to share across companies, while still being able to customize per company:

Shared agent definitions, with per-company overrides. I want to define an agent one time, including its role, instructions, and behavior, and reuse it everywhere. A company should be able to change parts of it, like the tone, an extra rule, or a different model, without having to copy the whole thing and maintain its own version.

Shared skills, with per-company overrides. Common skills like compliance rules, a writing style, a brand voice template, or a vendor integration should live in one place and be available to every company. When a company needs one of them to behave a little differently, it should be able to override just that part and inherit the rest.

Shared routines. The same scheduled routine, like a daily content pass or a weekly report, often applies to several companies. I'd rather define it once and have each company run its own copy, ideally with a few per-company settings, than recreate the whole routine in every company.

More broadly, the idea is simple. Anything that's a building block rather than company-specific data should be definable once at a higher level and inherited down, with the freedom to override it where a company needs to.

The basic idea

Picture a simple cascade. You define a base layer once, with your agent definitions, skills, and routines. Every company inherits from that base. Each company can override whatever it needs. When you change the base, every company picks up the change automatically unless it has chosen to do something different for that piece. Nobody has to break the shared layer to customize their own company.

Not about sharing between agents within a company

This isn't about shared knowledge inside one company (making all its agents know the mission or brand voice). That's a separate need, already discussed elsewhere and mostly solvable today. I'm talking about the opposite direction: sharing setup across separate companies that one person owns.

Not about templating

To be clear, this isn't template-at-creation (copy a definition into a new company once, like #336). That seeds a company but drifts the moment you edit the original. I mean a live shared definition: change it once and every company that uses it updates automatically, with each company still able to override locally.

Who this is for

Anyone running a few companies on one instance:

• An operator with several brands
• An agency that runs its own internal company plus a company per client
• A holding company with multiple business units
• Anyone with two or more companies that share most of their setup but each need a few differences

Paperclip is excellent at keeping companies isolated, which is exactly what you want for data. But that same isolation means there's no sharing of the building blocks, even when most of them are identical from one company to the next.

Why this fits Paperclip

Paperclip is sold as "one control plane for your portfolio," but today reusing anything across companies means exporting and importing one company at a time, with no shared base that stays in sync when you change it. The platform nails multi-company isolation. The missing half is multi-company reuse. The plugin system and company import/export show the pieces already exist. This is just asking for those building blocks to be shareable across companies, with overrides, instead of moved one company at a time.

What I'd like to hear from others

• Is anyone else running multiple companies on one instance and running into this?
• How are you dealing with the duplication today?
• Does this base-plus-override idea match how you'd want it to work, or would you describe it differently?

If this is something you'd use too, a thumbs up helps show there's demand for it. Thanks for reading.