Paper Camp

A local-first, AI-native project companion that lives where your work lives.

Most project management tools are built around teams, dashboards, and the assumption that your work needs to be somewhere on the internet. Paper Camp rejects that. It lives in your repository, versioned alongside your code, invisible to everything except you and your AI assistant.

The core idea is simple: every project deserves a memory. Not a kanban board, not a ticket system — a structured, honest record of where you started, where you are, and where you're going. A place where ideas don't get lost in chat history. A place your AI can read in seconds and immediately understand the current state of your intent.

The folder is the database

A papercamp/ directory sits at the root of your project. It contains markdown files with a defined structure — ideas, plans, progress, decisions, open questions. No external services, no sync, no accounts. Every change is a git commit. The history of your project is the history of those files.

AI as a first-class collaborator

Paper Camp is designed around the way humans actually work with AI assistants. At the start of every session, you point your assistant to papercamp/ and it knows everything — what was built, what was decided, what's next. No re-explaining. No lost context. The structured files are not documentation written after the fact; they are the living source of truth that both you and the AI maintain together.

Quick Start

npm install -g @dendelion/paper-camp
paper-camp scan ~/dev
paper-camp start

Open the Local link start prints — it opens the hosted client, the one dashboard for every project this package runs, pointed at the API start just launched on this machine. ~/dev stands for the folder holding your repositories; paper-camp init run inside a single repo registers just that one instead of scanning. Prefer a single repo running in the foreground? paper-camp dev, run inside that repo, serves just that project's API in the terminal you started it from and prints its own Local link.

Working on Paper Camp

pnpm install
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3333 to access the dashboard.

Reachable from anywhere

paper-camp start only answers requests from the machine it runs on, or another device on the same LAN/tailnet. To reach it from the hosted client on a different machine over the open internet, run:

paper-camp start --share

This opens an account-less cloudflared quick tunnel and prints a registration link with its https://…trycloudflare.com address baked in — open that link in the hosted client and it's paired. The address changes every restart; that's the trade for needing no setup and no account.

Already on Tailscale?

If every machine involved is already on your tailnet, tailscale serve gives you a stable address and a real certificate with no third party in the path — worth it if you have Tailscale, but more setup than --share:

1. Enable HTTPS certificates for your tailnet once, in the Tailscale admin console under DNS → HTTPS Certificates.
2. From the machine running paper-camp start, serve it over HTTPS at a stable MagicDNS address:

   sudo tailscale serve --bg --https=443 / http://localhost:4333
   

   The first run needs sudo so Tailscale can provision the certificate.
3. Open https://<your-machine>.<your-tailnet>.ts.net/ — directly, or pasted into the hosted client — from any device on the tailnet. Stop sharing with tailscale serve reset.

Pages

• Plans — Browse and manage plans from papercamp/plans/
• Review — Code review findings surfaced as actionable plan phases
• Docs — Decisions, open questions, progress timeline, and repo docs
• Settings — Project configuration

MCP server

Any Model Context Protocol client can read and write your papercamp/ project via paper-camp mcp. See docs/MCP.md for the client config snippet and the full tool list.

License

MIT