You NEED to try these open-source AI projects right now...
TL;DR
Gary Tan’s GStack turns one coding agent into a startup team — Matthew frames it as YC’s playbook bottled into prompts like “office hours,” “CEO review,” and “staff engineer,” with nearly 50,000 GitHub stars just weeks after launch.
Hermes Agent is pitched as OpenClaw plus a built-in learning loop — Nouse Research’s project hit roughly 12,000–13,000 stars in days by combining chat app integrations, subagents, scheduling, and self-improving memory/skill creation across sessions.
Superpowers is the breakout developer tool here, with 115,000 GitHub stars — built by author Ora, it adds a structured Claude Code workflow around brainstorming, planning, worktrees, TDD, code review, and execution through a simple plugin install.
Paperclip pushes the boldest idea: AI doesn’t just help employees, it becomes the company — the open-source project with 33,000 stars orchestrates CEO, CTO, engineers, and marketers as agents in one dashboard, with cost tracking and ticket-based workflows.
Matthew’s real point is that the value is in the harness, not just the model — all four projects show agents getting more useful when wrapped in role-specific prompts, memory, orchestration, and process instead of being treated like a generic chatbot.
He repeatedly warns against “click button, wake up rich” agent hype — especially with Paperclip-style zero-human-company tools, he says real results still require effort and today’s systems remain experimental, expensive, and rough around the edges.
The Breakdown
GStack: Gary Tan’s YC brain as an open-source agent layer
Matthew opens with GStack, a new project from Y Combinator president Gary Tan that’s already nearing 50,000 GitHub stars after just a couple weeks. He’s clearly excited by the premise: Tan took years of startup pattern recognition from backing companies like Airbnb and DoorDash and turned it into a prompt-driven system that helps solo builders work like “a team of 20,” riffing on Andrej Karpathy’s line about not typing code since December.
From “office hours” to “10-star product” before you write a line of code
What makes GStack interesting, in Matthew’s telling, is that it’s “a process, not a collection of tools.” The slash commands map to roles and rituals — office hours, engineering manager, senior designer, debugger — and force you to sharpen the product idea before coding, including six YC-style questions and a “10-star product” lens borrowed from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.
Quick sponsor detour, and why Matthew says his tiny team looks bigger than it is
He pauses for a Microsoft sponsorship, but folds it into a personal point: people constantly ask what his “real job” is because they don’t believe a YouTube channel can be a real small business. He says tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot help his team search docs, review legal files, and produce hundreds of videos a year, which he ties back to the same theme of small teams punching above their weight with AI.
Hermes Agent: the OpenClaw alternative that learns from experience
Back to open source, Matthew calls Hermes Agent by Nouse Research “mega viral,” landing around 12,000–13,000 stars in only a few days. He describes it less like a coding assistant and more like a full agent operating system, with a terminal UI, support for Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp/Signal, and a migration path for OpenClaw users who don’t want to rebuild workflows and memories from scratch.
The self-improving loop is the hook
The standout feature is Hermes’s “closed learning loop”: it creates skills from experience, improves them while in use, nudges itself to save knowledge, and searches past conversations to build a persistent model of the user. Matthew connects that directly to Karpathy’s auto-research ideas and says these self-improving loops have been inspiring a lot of new experimentation.
Superpowers: Claude Code with better instincts and a stronger process
Next comes Superpowers, the biggest repo of the bunch at 115,000 stars, which Matthew says basically gives Claude Code “superpowers.” He laughs at its self-description — an implementation plan clear enough for “an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste, no judgment, no project context, and an aversion to testing” — and uses that to explain the project’s focus on TDD, YAGNI, DRY, and a more disciplined dev workflow.
Brainstorm, plan, execute — all as a plugin
Unlike GStack’s prompt pack approach, Superpowers installs as a Claude plugin with a one-line command. Matthew shows how /s superpowers brainstorm kicks off a guided workflow that refines ideas, explores alternatives, saves design docs, uses worktrees for parallelization, and moves through planning, execution, testing, review, and branch completion.
Paperclip: if OpenClaw is the employee, this is the whole company
Matthew saves the wildest concept for last: Paperclip, an open-source “zero-human company” orchestrator with 33,000 stars. He’s careful here — almost bluntly so — warning viewers not to expect magical passive income, saying you are not going to wake up with $1,000 in your bank account because you typed a prompt, but he still finds the vision compelling.
A dashboard full of AI executives, engineers, and costs
Paperclip runs as a Node.js server with a React UI where CEO, CMO, CTO, and engineers are all agents like Claude or Codex, organized in an org chart. Matthew highlights the atomic work units, ticketing system, cost/token tracking, company-level goals, and roadmap items like plugins, knowledge bases, OpenClaw-style agents, and companies.sh for exporting or importing an entire AI organization — ending on the note that these projects are still rough, but they’re a real glimpse of where agents are heading.