I built a butter knife for your AI agent's clipboard

There are probably a million reasons why I shouldn't have built this. If you know any, leave a comment below.

Here's my workflow, dozens of times a day: I ask Claude to write a query, or a curl command, or a function. Claude writes it. Then I have to select the text — carefully, because the markdown fences aren't part of it — copy it, switch to my terminal or editor, and paste.

It's not hard. It's just constant. And every time I do it I think: you're an AI agent with access to my shell. Why am I the one doing this?

So I built agent-pb — a clipboard butter knife. You say /pb and the agent finds the most recent useful thing in your conversation — a query, a shell command, a code block, a URL — and spreads it right into your clipboard. No selecting. No highlighting. You just paste.

The metaphor came naturally. pb is the macOS clipboard command (pbcopy/pbpaste), but it's also how the tool feels. You're not carefully cutting and placing text — you're just spreading it where it needs to go, like butter on toast.

The interesting design decision was making it portable. agent-pb is a proper Claude Code plugin, but the core of it is just a prompt and a shell command. There's nothing Claude-specific about "find the most recent useful artifact and pipe it to the clipboard."

So the GitHub repo includes a portable snippet — drop it into your .cursorrules, .windsurfrules, .github/copilot-instructions.md, or whatever your agent reads. Same butter knife, different bread.

Cross-platform too: pbcopy on macOS, xclip on Linux, clip.exe on WSL. The skill auto-detects.

This is the second tool in what I'm calling the agent-* family. The first was agent-look — a screenshot scanner that lets you say /look instead of dragging image files into Claude.

Same philosophy: stop moving things around manually. Let the agent handle the boring mechanical parts so you can stay in flow.