Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying.
I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
freedomben 1 days ago [-]
> I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.
Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora
snoman 1 days ago [-]
Clippy was a laughing stock and target of derisive comedy for years. It has such bad brand recognition that nobody should be surprised that they aren’t using it.
tiborsaas 13 hours ago [-]
While true, it turned into a cultural phenomena, a close inspiration even showed up in Cyberpunk 2077 as an AI gun. So if MS would have revitalized it, it could have been done in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine.
> in a self ironic way to show some personality and taste and not be a cold, calculated money machine.
You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
6 hours ago [-]
Nevermark 1 days ago [-]
I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.
Clippy was useless.
But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!
It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.
And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
bcoates 19 hours ago [-]
Clippy's popups were useless, but his chat interface actually worked fine (within the domian of MS office questions) things like "how do I add page numbers" or "count the paragraphs in my document")
The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
I sneak Clippy into most of the presentations I give.
dullcrisp 22 hours ago [-]
But pushy and tone-deaf is what they are. Unless they change their whole corporate structure for this, it’d be equally tone-deaf for someone from their marketing department to pretend that Microsoft is hip and self-aware now. Better to be honest.
Nevermark 2 hours ago [-]
I get the strange feeling you wouldn’t be happy with “New Clippy’s” occasional off topic purchase recommendations!
hosh 21 hours ago [-]
I remember Clippy, but I don't remember why it was annoying. I am thinking that Robert Brooke's 3 laws of robotics applies here. (He had written one for AI but I think his thoughts on robotics are more relavent to AI agents).
acutesoftware 15 hours ago [-]
I think it was the modal dialog box that forced you to stop what you were doing and click 'piss off clippy', rather than being able to ignore it.
That would be violating the second design principle:
"When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times."
With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard.
With Clippy, it intrusively stops humans from being able to do what they are doing.
trinix912 14 hours ago [-]
Additionally, there was an option that was on by default to use Clippy in place of confirmation dialogs. You'd try to close an unsaved file and instead of the usual Windows dialog you'd get Clippy asking whether you'd like to save changes instead.
hnfong 19 hours ago [-]
It tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.
bcoates 19 hours ago [-]
"It looks like you’re trying to write a term paper at 2am the night before it’s due, do you want me to just put out some LLM slop and hope for the best?"
wpm 5 hours ago [-]
Comic Sans was a laughing stock and a target of derisive comedy, but now it can be used ironically, or in the case of Comic Mono, very straight faced as well.
cmdrriker 5 hours ago [-]
Friends don't let friends use comic sans, papyrus or it's imitators IMHO.
nashashmi 17 hours ago [-]
It should at least have been an April fools joke. “Microsoft renames copilot for MS word as Clippy’s Pilot”
8note 19 hours ago [-]
clippy was also quite helpful though, as a kid with no idea what stuff i could do with Word.
its just that it outlived its welcome quickly, once i learned everything that i needed. the lesson to learn is i think about how to move from that guided experience into more power tools
okeuro49 14 hours ago [-]
Who can remember clippy right click "animate"?
alt227 14 hours ago [-]
That, wordart, and the secret flight sim in Excel 97 were the entirety of how I spent my school days.
taneq 7 hours ago [-]
What, no Encarta? :P
alt227 6 hours ago [-]
We did not have encarta at our school, that was for the rich kids.
However I have great memories of playing the sample of 'Changes' by David Bowie when I got a bit older and had access to a copy.
richardw 24 hours ago [-]
Do it on April 1. With a “we told you so” tagline. Have a few 2025/6 templates, like writing a presidential executive order because there are so many of them.
nashashmi 17 hours ago [-]
And wait for the reactions. If it’s great, announce it as not-a-joke.
mixmastamyk 23 hours ago [-]
It was, but as someone without a dog in the hunt, I loved that ol' Clipmeister.
Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
apwell23 19 hours ago [-]
what about Links the cat. I used to love it.
Der_Einzige 22 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Bob would be even funnier, you know it.
muzani 17 hours ago [-]
I think it was not funny to people trying to get work done. But that generation is retired now. The current generation is the one that were typing essays in Word and were too early to steal MP3s, so they had to use Clippy as the distraction.
6510 1 days ago [-]
yeah, make it give edgy suggestions like: Do you want to find a new job?
nightski 1 days ago [-]
They did though, I swear it was in a presentation you could select clippy as an avatar.
clicked this link on mobile and every page scroll caused another malicious ad redirect (??) there's also a huge bouncing "remove ads" button with an X that opens an advert in the background. can't tell if the ads are on purpose or if the owners have just ticked every ad network box
joecool1029 1 days ago [-]
You're not wrong, but both mullvad's free DNS base filter (here: https://github.com/mullvad/encrypted-dns-profiles ) and Wipr blocked it on my iphone. Android just use ublock origin with firefox or another variant.
Spare_account 1 days ago [-]
Genuine question, if you're willing to indulge me: Why aren't you using ad-blocking of one type or another?
(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)
I don't browse without it these days.
bstsb 1 days ago [-]
> mobile
i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone
Spare_account 1 days ago [-]
Strong recommend for Android, Firefox and uBlock Origin
I also have these Extensions:
ClearURLs
Decentraleyes
Privacy Badger
I still don't care about cookies
JCattheATM 23 hours ago [-]
Privacy Badger and UBlock Origin don't work well together, and LocalCDN is better than Decentraleyes
ghostwords 6 hours ago [-]
Nah, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin do work well together.
nightski 1 days ago [-]
Sorry didn't notice, it was the top google result. I have ublock origin and firefox so I tend not to see many ads.
Arisaka1 14 hours ago [-]
>I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.
I attribute this to the fact that big corporations like Microsoft have so much bureaucracy and moving cogs that even something as simple as a request to reuse a UI element like Clippy would be stuck between the cogs forever.
pragma_x 1 days ago [-]
There's a lot of missed opportunities out there. For example, AskJeeves is still just a vanilla search engine (Google front-end).
ComplexSystems 1 days ago [-]
That kind of sucks, because there's AI LLM's just about everywhere else now. Even those customer service "live chat" windows are typically AI first. What are Ask Jeeves doing?
indrora 1 days ago [-]
I'm firmly of the opinion that if they had shipped what is copilot as Cortana, they'd have seen little to no backlash.
jhoh 10 hours ago [-]
In a few places, Microsoft sneaks in clever references to Clippy in the Azure LLM documentation[0]. Nice to see they're still letting a bit of humor shine through here and there.
Am I right to feel wary of clicking this link? My spidy sense says 'don't do it'.
bstsb 1 days ago [-]
it's an ibb.co link; ibb.co is just an free online image host (the link lets you preview the uploaded image)
legohead 24 hours ago [-]
Early on I gave it a custom instruction:
Be informal, and make responses as short and concise as possible. Do not waste words apologizing.
system2 23 hours ago [-]
That's a fantastic question! I see you think like a pro!
oogabooga13 21 hours ago [-]
Agreed! I use Gemini and have found that I've been able to successfully shape the tone of the outputs -specifically away from the overly cheerful default by using the "saved info" section where you can basically act like a director for it.
wombatpm 15 hours ago [-]
Might as well bring back the entire Microsoft BoB interface as well
jahewson 1 days ago [-]
That’s a lot of hate you’re channeling there.
iwontberude 20 hours ago [-]
I've enjoyed honing a GPT accent of sorts to make my friends laugh, one of my favorites is re-summarizing what someone says in a smarmy way and then adding "With your understanding in x you've been playing chess while others have been merely playing checkers."
teaearlgraycold 1 days ago [-]
Customers I build AI chat features for also liken it to clippy. I think it’s a very common association.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
I hope you accept that likening how it is intended, and I can't imagine that being a good thing. Clippy was universally panned. To me, I wouldn't be telling people that the thing I'm spending time working on was received as this generation's Clippy.
Levitz 1 days ago [-]
Clippy was panned because it was intrusive and offered very little real help, but the design and concept themselves were always popular.
dylan604 24 hours ago [-]
you just described modern LLM bots as well
teaearlgraycold 20 hours ago [-]
When talking with them I was surprised because they seemed to be invoking his name positively.
mock-possum 6 hours ago [-]
I’d much rather talk to Clippy than Cortana.
I really can’t stand their brain dead appropriation of AI - first Cortana, which they stole from Halo, now CoPilot, which they stole from GitHub (and should have been named Cod*e*Pilot anyway) -
Clippy is right there!!
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
One underused Clippy feature is the fact that Clippy and all the other Agents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent), like the dog that did search in Windows XP, came with an API developers could use to write their own assistants.
Thanks to the horrific beauty of ActiveX, this even allowed these Agents to be loaded into web pages.
The API was supported up till Windows 7 (though it was an optional component at the time) but still I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself) and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
mananaysiempre 9 hours ago [-]
> I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself)
The actual character of Clippy was not included with the Agent SDK (unlike some other options available in Office, like the Wizard), so you’d have to dig it out of an actual copy of Office, or get it from someone who already did so:
I actually used one of these in a VB app back in the day as a joke.. it was the robot I used.. if you typed in something wrong in a a text box.. it would shake his arms and call you an idiot
Actually this is a good way to find product ideas. I placed a query in Grok to find posts about what people want, similar to this. Then it performs multiple searches on X including embedding search, and suggested people want stuff like tamagotchi, ICQ etc. back.
drilbo 15 hours ago [-]
I feel like these are all great examples of things people think they want. Making a post about it is one thing, actually buying or using a product, I think the majority of nostalgic people will quickly remember why they don't actually want it in their adult life.
npunt 15 hours ago [-]
I see this a lot in vintage computing. What we want is the feelings we had back then, the context, the growing possibilities, youth, the 90s, whatever. What we get is a semi-working physical object that we can never quite fix enough to relive those experiences. But we keep acquiring and fixing and tinkering anyway hoping this time will be different while our hearts become torn between past and present.
worldsayshi 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah this is not even faster horses. It's horses that can count like Clever Hans.
ants_everywhere 1 days ago [-]
Fun fact: clippy came from Microsoft Bob, which Melinda Gates was the marketing manager for.
I have often wondered what role their relationship played in keeping Clippy around. And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce.
lawlessone 1 days ago [-]
>And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce
I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.
maybelsyrup 1 days ago [-]
> I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all
Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle
pantulis 15 hours ago [-]
Or Melinda.
dehrmann 1 days ago [-]
Can you add narration in Gilbert Gottfried's voice?
IIRC correctly, Clippy’s most famous feature was interrupting you to offer advice. The advice was usually basic/useless/annoying, hence Clippy’s reputation, but a powerful LLM could actually make the original concept work. It would not be simply a chatbot that responds to text, but rather would observe your screen, understand it through a vision model, and give appropriate advice. Things like “did you know there’s an easier way to do what you’re doing”. I don’t think the necessary trust exists yet to do this using public LLM APIs, nor does the hardware to do it locally, but crack either of those and I could see ClipGPT being genuinely useful.
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
The way I remember it a lot of software had "help" documentation with full text search in the late 1980s and early 1990s but the common denominator was that it didn't work in the sense that you got useful answers less than 10% of the time. Until Google came along, users got trained to avoid full text search facilities.
The full text facility attached to Clippy really was helpful, getting useful answers around 50% of the time. I thought the whole point of making him an engaging cartoon character was to overcome the prejudice mid-1990s users had towards full-text search in help.
freedomben 1 days ago [-]
It looks like you're writing a letter.
Would you like help?
* Get help with writing the letter
* Just type the letter without help
|_| Don't show me this tip again
jaza 22 hours ago [-]
It looks like you're one of the 1% of humans who still write letters themselves! Dear me, imagine that, what do you think this is, the 90s or something?! Would you like to join the other 99% of humans and doomscroll and shytpost while I write that letter for you?
We are probably getting closer to that with the newer multimodal LLMs, but you'd almost need to take a screenshot on intervals fed directly to the LLM to provide a sort of chronological context to help it understand what the user is trying to do and gauge the users intentions.
As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
nrmitchi 1 days ago [-]
> As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
Of the technical, hang-out-on-HN crowd? Ya, probably not many.
Of the other 99.99% of computer users? The majority of them wouldn't even think about it, let alone care. To quote a phrase, ”the user is going to pick dancing pigs over security every time”.
Even without the non-chalent attitude towards security, the majority of the population has been so conditioned that everything they do on a computer is already being sent to 1) Apple, 2) Google, 3) Microsoft, or 4) their employer, that they're burnt-out of caring.
All that is to say that if you can make a widely-available real-time LLM assistant that appeals to non-technical users, please invite me to your private-island-celebrity-filled-yacht-parties.
pr337h4m 11 hours ago [-]
Models with native video understanding would do the trick - Advanced Voice Mode on the ChatGPT iOS/Android app lets you use your camera, works pretty well; there's also https://aistudio.google.com/live (AFAIK there are no open-source models with similar capabilities)
johnisgood 1 days ago [-]
> I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM
shudders.
Henchman21 1 days ago [-]
So, the Replay feature being slowly rolled out in Win11?
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
I think we're well into the paradigm of "hidden employee activity monitoring software" already taking periodic screenshots and sending it to an LLM somewhere, which then generates aggregate performance metrics and dashboards for managers. I've heard of multiple companies working on this for $bigcorp environments, customer service/call center workstation PCs, etc.
rossant 1 days ago [-]
Even funnier would be to make it unnecessarily mean and vexing.
Wait, are you really looking this up? You don't even know how to do this? Are you kidding me?
Gosh, it's been an hour and you still haven't fixed this bug? Are you retarded or something? You don't deserve this job.
spauldo 13 hours ago [-]
You might look into vigor, a mean-spirited version of clippy for the vi editor.
jahewson 1 days ago [-]
I already have a little voice in my head that tells me those things!
That said, if we could automate it, it might free up more of my brain for productivity…
GoblinSlayer 1 days ago [-]
>and give appropriate advice
"It's time to work, Dave"
Henchman21 1 days ago [-]
I’m sorry, I can’t do that Hal
trinix912 14 hours ago [-]
> Things like “did you know there’s an easier way to do what you’re doing”
That could come off just as patronizing as the original Clippy. If it said things like "Would you like me to generate you a letter for X?" it would be miles ahead of the original.
24 hours ago [-]
hbn 1 days ago [-]
Microsoft infamously is adding AI to Windows to constantly watch your screen and people understandably are not super excited for it.
basch 1 days ago [-]
I personally can’t wait to ask to recall something I saw before but can’t quite remember where.
Pretty soon I won’t even need biological memory.
kurisufag 23 hours ago [-]
i added a minutely scrot cronjob about a year ago and haven't used it once. remembering "that website i was on last week" is apparently not a real problem I was having
jayGlow 1 days ago [-]
if it ran entirely on the local machine and didn't send information back to Microsoft I think people would be far more accepting of it.
TiredOfLife 14 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what recall was and is
spauldo 13 hours ago [-]
You missed the "for now" at the end of that sentence.
6510 1 days ago [-]
It can still be annoying; I feel it is part of his personality.
It looks like you are writing a comment on Hacker News.
Would you like help with:
- Commas? There shouldn't be one behind "responds to text"
- Capitalization? You've missed a D in "did you know..."
- Punctuation? You've missed a question mark behind "what you’re doing". It goes inside the quotes, of course!
[] Don't ever suggest anything like this ever again.
I thought this immediately also. I already have ollama set up to run llm tasks locally. I don't want to duplicate that but it would be fun to try this front end.
nonethewiser 11 hours ago [-]
I really love the style.
I wish this sort of style had a more specific name and could be decoupled from the desktop a bit more.
Would love to see a native webpage inspired by windows 2000 or similar. I've struggled to find a name for it.
Wow. The ease-of-use is insanely good. I haven't figured out yet how to move clippy to a different location on the screen (rather than centred), but it works well. I have multiple models downloaded and am chatting already!
siryeetey 1 days ago [-]
click and drag on the bottom right corner of clippy to drag
tootyskooty 8 hours ago [-]
Really cool! I think OS integration can be taken a lot further. Looking forward to seeing more of this esp. as models get better! First thing that comes to mind are generative GTK widgets; small purpose-built widgets for any task, styled to match your setup.
On a side note, I'm excited to see more an more ambitious side projects like these as LLMs empower hobbyists to do more in less time than was ever possible before.
thunfischtoast 14 hours ago [-]
no front, but your comment reads a little bit like it was written by an LLM trying to push usage of LLMs^^
codebolt 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe I've been chatting with them so much I'm starting to sound like one myself.
sigmaisaletter 1 days ago [-]
It looks like you're talking about a cartoon assistant character. Would you like help?
ICYDN: The proper name of Clippy is actually "Clippit", as introduced in Office 97.
novaRom 1 days ago [-]
Finally a useful UI for llama.cpp!
Thank you Felix! This is extremely cool! Can you please make a short blog post explaining how is it technically implemented?
devilsbabe 15 hours ago [-]
Very cool project! It would be really nice to have support for the other assistants that Microsoft released to use in place of Clippy (I'm particularly fond of the dolphin that was used in the Japanese version of Windows) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant#Assistants
webprofusion 16 hours ago [-]
Microsoft should buy this for $3B
_pdp_ 1 days ago [-]
Super cool. Serious 90s vibes. I also tried to make a super clippy here. https://chatbotkit.com/examples/super-clippy I think I match the color shema perfectly but does not have the same feeling as the original.
stavros 1 days ago [-]
It's way too high resolution!
PaulHoule 1 days ago [-]
Animations are missing too.
SLWW 1 days ago [-]
When do we get the BonziBuddy reskin?
rileytg 1 days ago [-]
I recently did this in our main system that we recently added an LLM feature to (for fun internally, not sending to prod) using
One of my very first AI projects was in the late 90s and used the Microsoft Agent API (which Clippy uses) as the interface.
It used Merlin rather than Clippy and was extremely basic as AI. But it was a fun project.
sen 19 hours ago [-]
I love this, and will unironically use it as a little desktop LLM, but it seems to completely ignore the prompt that’s in the settings. No matter what model I install it’s just “being” the default model.
The general idea is awesome though, and a lot more fun than just having a quake-terminal to interface with local LLMs via ollama.
tommica 13 hours ago [-]
Would love to have a mac shortcut to toggle clippy chat window, and also so that when the chat window gets opened, the chatbox gets focuses automatically
That's a ghost of Clippy. It's not reacting at all!
ale42 1 days ago [-]
Great idea and design, thanks for this! I was hoping since some time to see this :-D
I hope that one day a non-Electron app (to minimize resource usage when idle) will also appear!
omneity 22 hours ago [-]
The idea is great but its personality needs some more sass. And maybe some contextual cues just so that it does the exact opposite of what would have been most helpful then :)
I feel like a text editor + clippy would be an even more potent combo! After all, that was clippy's original context.
ciaranmca 10 hours ago [-]
Nice project! Looks good and seems like something I’d genuinely want to use day to day.
Aardwolf 1 days ago [-]
It's weird that when clippy was new I found it to be everything that's wrong with UI design, and today I'm nostalgic for it
oneeyedpigeon 1 days ago [-]
Nah, it's not weird. You said it yourself: nostalgia. It's human nature to romanticise the past. I bet you would hate it again if you used it today.
GTP 11 hours ago [-]
Decades later, you made a version of Clippy that might actually be useful. Congratulations!
uptownfunk 17 hours ago [-]
Hahah I would
Love to see this thing back in windows. The only thing I use now is ms teams since they killed Skype and my foreign music teacher requires us to use it
0points 1 days ago [-]
Will this properly interrupt me in the middle of flow and ask unrelated questions, or is it just another clippy knock-off?
dr_kiszonka 1 days ago [-]
Funny. But you know, with multimodal models perhaps someone will finally crack when it is appropriate to interrupt someone with a relevant suggestion. I think I would like a personal assistant that would be able to say, "Hey, you have been debugging this one function for 5 hours and you still have 3 more to fix by EOB. Would it make sense to pause for a bit and see if other fixes could be done quickly?"
kuberwastaken 1 days ago [-]
Is it insane that I tried to make a version of this exactly a week ago!? This is freakin awesome, congratulations!
dbish 17 hours ago [-]
Since Clippy 2.0 is out in the real world now, you can pick another legend to revive. I went with AIM, replacing your AIM friends with AIs. You should do Stumbleupon with AI generated websites or bring back MSN :)
byearthithatius 1 days ago [-]
Fun fact: the newest generation (such as myself, a 23 year old programmer) were actually not even alive when Clippy existed. I only know of it from an Office reference. One day I will have something like that -- maybe MSN or internet explorer?
lolinder 1 days ago [-]
It's not quite that bad! The last version of Office released with Clippy was in May 2003! So you would have been born, if only just.
gus_massa 19 hours ago [-]
My old daughter loved the cat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGIcXKAXbI Not everybody updates Office on the day the new version is released, so they continue living for a long time.
byearthithatius 1 days ago [-]
Yeah I was a tiny little two year old:) Definitely wasn't coding yet hahaha
hosh 21 hours ago [-]
I wondered when someone was going to power Clippy with an LLM.
unixhero 14 hours ago [-]
How do I use it as a frontend for a locally hosted llm?
I have a 3090gtx, but never actually run/hosted any locally.
Cheers
TanYuho 15 hours ago [-]
This app is so much fun—it really brings back memories of when I used Windows 98 as a kid.
1 days ago [-]
danielhanchen 22 hours ago [-]
Wow fantastic website!! Love the Windows old aesthetic!
rerdavies 1 days ago [-]
I still haven't gotten over the trauma of Clippy 1.0.
rockemsockem 22 hours ago [-]
At last! I've heard it mentioned so many times and have done so myself, but you went and made it. Kudos and thank you!!!
tasn 1 days ago [-]
I love the terrible font rendering! Is it a special font, or some CSS?
rhet0rica 1 days ago [-]
Looks like it's a special font provided by https://github.com/jdan/98.css (Which has come a long way in the past couple of years, despite still being 0.1.x)
Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.
prezjordan 24 hours ago [-]
I should probably 1.0 it and call it a day, it's pretty much done. In the back of my mind I've thought of making the markup more amenable to LLMs like Sonnet (maybe with tailwind style utility classes)
Telemakhos 1 days ago [-]
I can't get this to work on my aging 2017 Intel work mac.
> Sadly, Clippy failed to successfully load the model. This could be an issue with Clippy itself, the selected model, or your system. You can report this error at github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/issues. The error was:
Really interesting project. I love the combination of LLM with a 90s aesthetic. Great that it works with a really simple configuration and runs offline
mbowcut2 1 days ago [-]
Pack it up boys, they finally made the killer app.
aligundogdu 1 days ago [-]
This is such an amazing piece of work — truly impressive! Hats off to you If it supports Ollama and local LLMs too, it'll be absolutely unbeatable!
daviding 23 hours ago [-]
A nice addition (unless I missed it) would be to add an existing API key for remote model access?
DigiEggz 1 days ago [-]
Accept my deepest gratitudes for creating this functional art. Love the idea and execution and can't wait to use it!
willejs 24 hours ago [-]
Can this keep popping up, interrupt you, and have the most annoying voice ever added please?
rolph 21 hours ago [-]
i think badgey may reflect the situation better than clippy.
They definitely missed on using underlines for headings
patrick4urcloud 16 hours ago [-]
nice !
This time it's working better than the original.
timvdalen 12 hours ago [-]
I honestly might keep this running just to have clippy always on top, without using the chat at all...
andwrobs 18 hours ago [-]
Flawless execution, all the details are sharp. That's fun.
rangerelf 1 days ago [-]
This is a thing of beauty, thank you!! :-D
givemeethekeys 1 days ago [-]
Like phoenix, it rises from the ashes..
sachahjkl 11 hours ago [-]
"made with Electron" bruh cmon
tungolcild 15 hours ago [-]
Finally!
King-Aaron 15 hours ago [-]
Needs a Bonzai Buddy to go with it!
insane_dreamer 16 hours ago [-]
Does it pop up every time you open your IDE, with "It looks like you're about to start coding. What can I help you with?"
ninetyninenine 18 hours ago [-]
Clippy was ahead of it's time. We all had no idea.
shmerl 18 hours ago [-]
What about Skippy?
awesome_dude 20 hours ago [-]
We've all been thinking it :)
integricho 16 hours ago [-]
given it's targeted look, why isn't it an actual native app?
unethical_ban 23 hours ago [-]
I couldn't find how to get back to the normal chat screen from settings easily, and loading the same model file that works in LM studio crashed my computer.
I like the idea, though.
amiantos 1 days ago [-]
a very basic app getting a bunch of undue attention thanks to nostalgia for someone else's IP, classic
urbandw311er 1 days ago [-]
You almost sound bitter about it
amiantos 1 days ago [-]
and...? it does not change the fact that this "app" would get 0 attention if it wasn't using nostalgic IP that does not belong to the developer. their are undoubtedly better, more original apps being posted to HN right now that likely deserve the attention more, but they're not using stolen IP to get attention, so they don't.
ummonk 1 days ago [-]
Awesome! Now I just want Perplexity to acquire the AskJeeves brand.
aussieguy1234 1 days ago [-]
Revenge of the paperclips
dismalaf 1 days ago [-]
Clippy was peak Windows. Everything went downhill since...
artursapek 1 days ago [-]
I thought Clippy first shipped in XP
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
You may be mixing it up with the explorer search dog. Whose name was Rover, apparently.
artursapek 20 hours ago [-]
aw he was so cute
mig39 1 days ago [-]
Nope, I remember it in Office 97. Which was released in 1996, of course.
oh yes, sure, It's not just an another useless shitty electron app, it's object of art. yeah.
quantum_state 20 hours ago [-]
quite cute
talkinghead 1 days ago [-]
yes yes yes!!!
margorczynski 1 days ago [-]
"I can fix him"
rafram 1 days ago [-]
This is cool, but does no one even look at what libraries they're shipping anymore? I mean, why does this Clippy-style LLM interface bundle:
- A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language
- A full GitHub API client
- A library that takes a string and tells you if it's a valid npm package name
- A useless shim for the JavaScript Math module
And 119 other libraries? This thing would have taken up 10% of the maximum disk space available on a Windows 95 FAT16 volume.
felixrieseberg 1 days ago [-]
The real answer is that some of us (the Electron maintainers) have been playing with local LLMs in desktop apps and right now, node-llama-cpp is by far the easiest way to experiment - but it's also not meant for desktop apps and hence has _a lot_ of dependencies.
In general, pruning libraries in Electron isn't as easy as it should be - it's probably something for us to work on.
anaisbetts 1 days ago [-]
So to be clear, your complaint is that the nostalgia Clippy app that puts a cartoon paper clip on your desktop, isn't efficient enough?
rafram 1 days ago [-]
I think it’s legitimate to ask why these dependencies are necessary. LLMs have created whole new classes of vulnerabilities, and things like a GitHub client (which downloads arbitrary data/code) and a templating engine (which executes it) expose an even larger attack surface.
If someone’s going to get RCE on my machine, I don’t want it to be through the silly Clippy LLM UI, you know?
criddell 1 days ago [-]
Maybe it was vibe coded and the libraries were added while going down paths that turned out to be dead ends and the LLM never cleaned up after itself?
coder543 1 days ago [-]
People have been perfectly capable of making that mistake themselves since long before "vibe coding" existed.
NitpickLawyer 1 days ago [-]
> A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language
A guess without looking into the code: Jinja templating is used to define how to prompt the model (i.e. system first, then this specific character / token, then user, then if it's a tool prepend this and append that, etc.)
xyc 1 days ago [-]
It seems that this is possibly not necessary, since LLaMA.cpp already integrates Jinja with CPP implementation (through minja)
pvg 1 days ago [-]
I think this is explained on the linked project page:
This project isn't trying to be your best chat bot. I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology paired with one the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025.
You might be looking for the more minimalist Grumpy which is hand-hewn from a pure silicon monocrystal.
Actually this says the trademark is pending them proving they are using it and they aren’t so they keep filing extensions. Also it’s limited in scope to word processing (at there is lots of back and forth with the trademark office about that)
muwtyhg 1 days ago [-]
The character is actually named Clippit. Although maybe MS trademarked Clippy after it became the more common name.
pier25 1 days ago [-]
I seriously doubt Microsoft would enforce it for a non-commercial side project.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
Trademarks have to actually be used to remain enforceable, I think. Not sure MS could claim Clippy after all this time, not that they might not try.
Microsoft uses Clippy for the paperclip emoji in the Fluent Emoji set. The trademark is why the open source version of Fluent Emoji doesn't use Clippy's likeness.
1 days ago [-]
mkgeorge7 1 days ago [-]
Question for the devs in here...something I've been thinking about a lot recently. So I see that OP linked out to a public github repo...but when downloading the actual bundle, what's a quick way for me to determine that what I'm installing on my mac is actually the same as what's in the public repo? It's always seemed like a loophole to me ready for (potential) exploitation.
>> Ship project.
>> Link out Github repo on the static site somewhere
>> Gain trust instantly as users presume the public repo is what's used behind the scenes
Disclaimer: I'm a web dev and don't know a single thing about native MacOS software
felixrieseberg 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, reproducible builds would be fantastic.
I sign my binaries on macOS with Apple codesign and notarize - and with Microsoft's Azure trusted signing for Windows. Both operating systems will actually show you a lot of warning dialogs before running anything unsigned. It's far from perfect - but I do wish we'd get more into the habit of signing binaries, even if open source.
dec0dedab0de 1 days ago [-]
you don't, that is what reproducible builds are trying to solve, but even then it would still need someone to compile and check.
It was great / depressing to mention Clippy at a recent meetup and see the generational divide between those who groaned and everyone who looked confused.
1 days ago [-]
arjav0703 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
UncleNoob 1 days ago [-]
I’m waiting for BonziBuddy AI
1 days ago [-]
animanoir 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
aaroninsf 1 days ago [-]
"...they didn't stop to think if they should.”
1 days ago [-]
rvz 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
1 days ago [-]
opeyeni 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
concerndc1tizen 1 days ago [-]
I hope people realize that this is an easy way to get a virus.
Don't install third party software except from highly trusted sources.
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
You sure wouldn't want them spying on you, stealing your data, chewing up your resources for shady profit schemes, or making your machine unbootable. Better to leave that to the experts at Microsoft and FAANG since all those features come preinstalled nowadays.
Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?
0points 12 hours ago [-]
Parent is giving general advice and you are calling it a "baseless attack". Grow some skin dude.
gwbas1c 1 days ago [-]
Microsoft Defender didn't find anything
1 days ago [-]
bigbuppo 1 days ago [-]
But BonzaiBuddy is your friend.
1 days ago [-]
0points 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
1 days ago [-]
Lammy 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
I'm all for these prepackaged local-only AI projects. Much more my speed than corporate cloud services. Real shame this one went down the path of choosing an embodiment that makes me want to shoot holes in my screen. It's even worse than those pixel art cats that chase my cursor on certain blogs. I miss plenty of things about the 90s, but I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to forget how much Clippy is not one of those things. Clippy would be more suitable for a horror game than an assistant. Going out of their way in the README to profusely thank Microsoft for summoning that hellspawn is just icing on the cake.
I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.
mrandish 1 days ago [-]
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.
This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.
I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Giving a chat agent a retro 90s UX that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
I'm in the exact same boat as you describe, except it was some other precompiled local-only project instead of this one that I tried a few months ago. That's why I said I like projects like these, because it's a fully private hassle free way to try out LLMs. Haven't really figured out any good purposes for it in my life, but I like to see these tools being made available to people without the time/motivation/savvy to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.
Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.
mrandish 23 hours ago [-]
> Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.
Ah, well that does explain why you have some... baggage. My experience was different as I wasn't supporting or interfacing regularly back then with anyone who wasn't tech savvy. I endured Clippy for about 30 seconds, realized it was a stupid idea only a big corporation would think was cool or useful, turned it off and moved on with my day.
raydiak 17 hours ago [-]
That makes total sense. I can see why many would be more Clippy tolerant if they hadn't had to explain its interruptions to other people and/or turn it off and move on with their day several dozen times or more.
volkk 1 days ago [-]
i'm not sure if this post was written with humor as intent, but i found it hilarious. ive never heard someone talk about clippy with such disdain.
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.
this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane product.
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
I'm glad! :) I do actually feel some less exaggerated version of what I wrote, but the excess in the verbiage was largely comedic. If you look it up pretty much anywhere, you'll find that there's a very large camp of us Clippy haters who never recovered. I was doing some amount of IT support at the time, and one of the main problems was all the popping up and asking questions confused people in various ways, and if you hid it the obvious way it'd just pop up again. Back when computers were still a new and novel thing for many people, having constant offers of "help" popping up when you're just trying to type a letter introduced counterproductive amounts of cognitive load for some frustrated users I got to deal with.
ants_everywhere 1 days ago [-]
is it possible you're not the target audience?
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
Which part of my original comment made that a question worth asking? Thought I had already expressed that fairly clearly.
basch 1 days ago [-]
I’d prefer it be an OS API.
You link your os to a local or cloud llm, and a local program asking the OS for a response and can’t even tell which one you’re using or whether it’s on the machine or not. It should all be abstracted away.
hadlock 1 days ago [-]
There's a number of standard APIs already, OpenAI supports Anthopic's MCP, LM studio supports both their proprietary API as well as OpenAI's API. OpenAI has open sourced their realtime API (https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-console/tree/webso...) and others. Most local clients just have a https://URL:port and then a drop down box for which RESTful API you want to use (for 88% of use cases they all support the same stuff, for realtime it's not quite settled yet), plus a field for an API key if needed.
raydiak 1 days ago [-]
To me, the value of these types of projects is specifically that they are self-contained and local-only. That's the only kind of interaction with it I'm comfortable with right now. I mostly jumped ship on commercial software a long time ago, so I'm hoping there will still be some AI-free linux distros for a good long time. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. At the point that the type of AI integration you're imagining becomes ubiquitous and mandatory, I may or may not stop working with computers entirely, depending on the state of the tech and the state of society by then.
fallinditch 23 hours ago [-]
Eloquently put.
... but I think we may be heading for a new 'golden age' of web animation and gratuitous creativity. Personally, I'm happy to see more crazy animated stuff, it's the corporate dark patterns and bad UX that I hate.
raydiak 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Sounds like a reasonable prediction. To me, crazy animated stuff in the wrong context is a component of bad UX. Though I learned web design by interning under a literal Nazi, so my design opinions may be a bit...extreme.
Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).
Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.
Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.
I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
Clippy was useless.
But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!
It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.
And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
Agreed!
Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
That would be violating the second design principle:
"When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times."
With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard.
With Clippy, it intrusively stops humans from being able to do what they are doing.
its just that it outlived its welcome quickly, once i learned everything that i needed. the lesson to learn is i think about how to move from that guided experience into more power tools
However I have great memories of playing the sample of 'Changes' by David Bowie when I got a bit older and had access to a copy.
Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
Edit: yes found it.
[1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...
(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)
I don't browse without it these days.
i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone
I also have these Extensions:
I attribute this to the fact that big corporations like Microsoft have so much bureaucracy and moving cogs that even something as simple as a request to reuse a UI element like Clippy would be stuck between the cogs forever.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/h...
They can bring back clippy, Cortana, and all the other variants, in classic or modern mode. Hell why not a BonziBuddy knockoff.
An opportunity for Carmen Sandiego as well.
I really can’t stand their brain dead appropriation of AI - first Cortana, which they stole from Halo, now CoPilot, which they stole from GitHub (and should have been named Cod*e*Pilot anyway) -
Clippy is right there!!
Thanks to the horrific beauty of ActiveX, this even allowed these Agents to be loaded into web pages.
The API was supported up till Windows 7 (though it was an optional component at the time) but still I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself) and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
https://archive.org/details/microsoftagentsoftwaredevelopmen...
> and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
The actual character of Clippy was not included with the Agent SDK (unlike some other options available in Office, like the Wizard), so you’d have to dig it out of an actual copy of Office, or get it from someone who already did so:
https://archive.org/details/clippitMS
(Was the WinXP search dog also an Agent character? I never guessed that for some reason.)
That and an appropriate system prompt could get pretty close to vigor from User Friendly.
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/20000104...
(and, of course pico-chu for the noobs.)
fun times
After all it was requested almost daily over at x.com
https://x.com/search?q=ai%20bring%20clippy%20back&src=typed_...
I have often wondered what role their relationship played in keeping Clippy around. And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce.
I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.
Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
The full text facility attached to Clippy really was helpful, getting useful answers around 50% of the time. I thought the whole point of making him an engaging cartoon character was to overcome the prejudice mid-1990s users had towards full-text search in help.
Would you like help?
* Get help with writing the letter
* Just type the letter without help
|_| Don't show me this tip again
As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
Of the technical, hang-out-on-HN crowd? Ya, probably not many.
Of the other 99.99% of computer users? The majority of them wouldn't even think about it, let alone care. To quote a phrase, ”the user is going to pick dancing pigs over security every time”.
Even without the non-chalent attitude towards security, the majority of the population has been so conditioned that everything they do on a computer is already being sent to 1) Apple, 2) Google, 3) Microsoft, or 4) their employer, that they're burnt-out of caring.
All that is to say that if you can make a widely-available real-time LLM assistant that appeals to non-technical users, please invite me to your private-island-celebrity-filled-yacht-parties.
shudders.
Wait, are you really looking this up? You don't even know how to do this? Are you kidding me?
Gosh, it's been an hour and you still haven't fixed this bug? Are you retarded or something? You don't deserve this job.
That said, if we could automate it, it might free up more of my brain for productivity…
"It's time to work, Dave"
That could come off just as patronizing as the original Clippy. If it said things like "Would you like me to generate you a letter for X?" it would be miles ahead of the original.
Pretty soon I won’t even need biological memory.
It looks like you are writing a comment on Hacker News.
Would you like help with:
- Commas? There shouldn't be one behind "responds to text"
- Capitalization? You've missed a D in "did you know..."
- Punctuation? You've missed a question mark behind "what you’re doing". It goes inside the quotes, of course!
[] Don't ever suggest anything like this ever again.
I wish this sort of style had a more specific name and could be decoupled from the desktop a bit more.
Would love to see a native webpage inspired by windows 2000 or similar. I've struggled to find a name for it.
ICYDN: The proper name of Clippy is actually "Clippit", as introduced in Office 97.
Thank you Felix! This is extremely cool! Can you please make a short blog post explaining how is it technically implemented?
https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs
It used Merlin rather than Clippy and was extremely basic as AI. But it was a fun project.
The general idea is awesome though, and a lot more fun than just having a quake-terminal to interface with local LLMs via ollama.
I hope that one day a non-Electron app (to minimize resource usage when idle) will also appear!
I feel like a text editor + clippy would be an even more potent combo! After all, that was clippy's original context.
I have a 3090gtx, but never actually run/hosted any locally.
Cheers
Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth
Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.
> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
https://github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/releases/tag/v0.4.1
> Sadly, Clippy failed to successfully load the model. This could be an issue with Clippy itself, the selected model, or your system. You can report this error at github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/issues. The error was:
> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
On macOS it always launches in the middle of the screen - is there a way to move it around?
https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/tiny-elvis/
I like the idea, though.
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-i...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6umxhkdKzSY&t=79s
- A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language
- A full GitHub API client
- A library that takes a string and tells you if it's a valid npm package name
- A useless shim for the JavaScript Math module
And 119 other libraries? This thing would have taken up 10% of the maximum disk space available on a Windows 95 FAT16 volume.
In general, pruning libraries in Electron isn't as easy as it should be - it's probably something for us to work on.
If someone’s going to get RCE on my machine, I don’t want it to be through the silly Clippy LLM UI, you know?
A guess without looking into the code: Jinja templating is used to define how to prompt the model (i.e. system first, then this specific character / token, then user, then if it's a tool prepend this and append that, etc.)
This project isn't trying to be your best chat bot. I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology paired with one the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025.
You might be looking for the more minimalist Grumpy which is hand-hewn from a pure silicon monocrystal.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90782096&caseSearchType=U...
>> Ship project. >> Link out Github repo on the static site somewhere >> Gain trust instantly as users presume the public repo is what's used behind the scenes
Disclaimer: I'm a web dev and don't know a single thing about native MacOS software
I sign my binaries on macOS with Apple codesign and notarize - and with Microsoft's Azure trusted signing for Windows. Both operating systems will actually show you a lot of warning dialogs before running anything unsigned. It's far from perfect - but I do wish we'd get more into the habit of signing binaries, even if open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
Don't install third party software except from highly trusted sources.
Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?
I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.
This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.
I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Giving a chat agent a retro 90s UX that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."
The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.
Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.
Ah, well that does explain why you have some... baggage. My experience was different as I wasn't supporting or interfacing regularly back then with anyone who wasn't tech savvy. I endured Clippy for about 30 seconds, realized it was a stupid idea only a big corporation would think was cool or useful, turned it off and moved on with my day.
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.
this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane product.
You link your os to a local or cloud llm, and a local program asking the OS for a response and can’t even tell which one you’re using or whether it’s on the machine or not. It should all be abstracted away.
... but I think we may be heading for a new 'golden age' of web animation and gratuitous creativity. Personally, I'm happy to see more crazy animated stuff, it's the corporate dark patterns and bad UX that I hate.
Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).
Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.
Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.