Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

https://felixrieseberg.github.io/clippy/

by felixrieseberg • 1 year ago

1122 271 1 year ago

felixrieseberg.github.io

Jagerbizzle• 1 year ago

Man do I ever miss this UI design. Nice work!

Perz1val• 1 year ago

Go contribute to SerenityOS then!

kuberwastaken• 1 year ago

Is it insane that I tried to make a version of this exactly a week ago!? This is freakin awesome, congratulations!

dbish• 1 year 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 :)

dehrmann• 1 year ago

Can you add narration in Gilbert Gottfried's voice?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY

alkh• 1 year ago

Great job! Having ollama support would be useful as well[1]! [1]https://github.com/ollama/ollama

totetsu• 1 year ago

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.

ale42• 1 year 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!

talkinghead• 1 year ago

yes yes yes!!!

rangerelf• 1 year ago

This is a thing of beauty, thank you!! :-D

tasn• 1 year ago

I love the terrible font rendering! Is it a special font, or some CSS?

rhet0rica• 1 year 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)

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.

prezjordan• 1 year 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)

nullchan• 1 year ago

Pretty sure Clippy is trademarked. Had the same idea but did not go through with it because of the TM.

SoftTalker2• 1 year 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.

mook• 1 year ago

Three fact that it's not a product anymore doesn't mean it's unused; a quick search says they at a minimum used it in 2021: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/07/0...

shrinks99• 1 year ago

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.

muwtyhg• 1 year ago

The character is actually named Clippit. Although maybe MS trademarked Clippy after it became the more common name.

maxwell• 1 year ago

Correct.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90782096&caseSearchType=U...

VanTheBrand• 1 year ago

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)

pier25• 1 year ago

I seriously doubt Microsoft would enforce it for a non-commercial side project.

basketbla• 1 year ago

Pretty fantastic follow-up to https://www.latent.space/p/clippy-v-anton

_pdp_• 1 year 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 year ago

It's way too high resolution!

PaulHoule2• 1 year ago

Animations are missing too.

rafram2• 1 year 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.

criddell• 1 year 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 year ago

People have been perfectly capable of making that mistake themselves since long before "vibe coding" existed.

NitpickLawyer• 1 year 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.)

xyc2• 1 year ago

It seems that this is possibly not necessary, since LLaMA.cpp already integrates Jinja with CPP implementation (through minja)

anaisbetts• 1 year 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?

rafram2• 1 year 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?

felixrieseberg3• 1 year 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.

pvg• 1 year 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.

Aardwolf• 1 year 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 year 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.

concerndc1tizen• 1 year ago

[flagged]

raydiak9• 1 year 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?

bigbuppo• 1 year ago

But BonzaiBuddy is your friend.

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

Microsoft Defender didn't find anything

tomhow• 1 year ago

I'm late to this, but we can do without this kind of comment on Hacker News, as it falls under the guidelines about generic tangents and tangential annoyances. It led to a hostile exchange down-thread, which is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid here, but is what happens when people take threads away from the main topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given we're a technology-focused site, Hacker News readers can be reasonably assumed to be technically proficient, and aware of the importance of taking normal security measures.

mkgeorge7• 1 year 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

dec0dedab0de• 1 year 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds

felixrieseberg3• 1 year 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.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

BonziBuddy next?

roskelld• 1 year ago

Followed by Tiny Elvis?

https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/tiny-elvis/

ayaros• 1 year ago

I love your website design.

aligundogdu• 1 year 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!

givemeethekeys• 1 year ago

Like phoenix, it rises from the ashes..

jl6• 1 year ago

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.

vunderba• 1 year ago

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 year 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.

walrus01• 1 year 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.

Henchman212• 1 year ago

So, the Replay feature being slowly rolled out in Win11?

johnisgood• 1 year ago

I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM

shudders.

pr337h4m• 1 year 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)

GoblinSlayer• 1 year ago

and give appropriate advice

"It's time to work, Dave"

Henchman212• 1 year ago

I’m sorry, I can’t do that Hal

PaulHoule2• 1 year 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.

freedomben2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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?

mock-possum2• 1 year ago

Always reminds me of this short - https://youtu.be/86KduX_HaPs

65102• 1 year 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.

hbn• 1 year ago

Microsoft infamously is adding AI to Windows to constantly watch your screen and people understandably are not super excited for it.

basch3• 1 year 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.

jayGlow• 1 year 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.

rossant• 1 year 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.

jahewson2• 1 year 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…

spauldo2• 1 year ago

You might look into vigor, a mean-spirited version of clippy for the vi editor.

trinix9122• 1 year 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.

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Next up, "Rover" the dog from Microsoft Bob

https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-i...

Tempest1981• 1 year ago

I was more a fan of "The Dot", especially when it morphed into a Picasso face:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6umxhkdKzSY&t=79s

tzury• 1 year ago

This is a clear case of "Build Something People Want".

After all it was requested almost daily over at x.com

https://x.com/search?q=ai%20bring%20clippy%20back&src=typed_...

xyc2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year 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.

ummonk• 1 year ago

Awesome! Now I just want Perplexity to acquire the AskJeeves brand.

0points• 1 year 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 year 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?"

mrandish3• 1 year ago

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).

freedomben2• 1 year 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

65102• 1 year ago

yeah, make it give edgy suggestions like: Do you want to find a new job?

snoman• 1 year 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.

pragma_x• 1 year 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 year 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?

teaearlgraycold2• 1 year ago

Customers I build AI chat features for also liken it to clippy. I think it’s a very common association.

dylan6042• 1 year 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.

nightski2• 1 year ago

They did though, I swear it was in a presentation you could select clippy as an avatar.

Edit: yes found it.

[1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...

bstsb3• 1 year ago

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

indrora• 1 year 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.

joeyagreco• 1 year ago

Just had ChatGPT make this: https://ibb.co/pB4SPJBW

fallinditch3• 1 year ago

Am I right to feel wary of clicking this link? My spidy sense says 'don't do it'.

basch3• 1 year ago

They will. It’s a no brainer to add a visual to the personality.

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.

jahewson2• 1 year ago

That’s a lot of hate you’re channeling there.

legohead• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

That's a fantastic question! I see you think like a pro!

oogabooga13• 1 year 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.

iwontberude• 1 year 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."

wombatpm• 1 year ago

Might as well bring back the entire Microsoft BoB interface as well

Arisaka1• 1 year 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.

jhoh• 1 year 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.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/h...

mock-possum2• 1 year 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!!

sigmaisaletter• 1 year 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.

artursapek2• 1 year ago

I thought Clippy first shipped in XP

mig39• 1 year ago

Nope, I remember it in Office 97. Which was released in 1996, of course.

layer8• 1 year ago

You may be mixing it up with the explorer search dog. Whose name was Rover, apparently.

artursapek2• 1 year ago

aw he was so cute

aaroninsf• 1 year ago

"...they didn't stop to think if they should.”

_-_-__-_-_-• 1 year ago

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 year ago

click and drag on the bottom right corner of clippy to drag

batch12• 1 year ago

Makes me think of this short story.

https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

elia_42• 1 year ago

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

DigiEggz• 1 year ago

Accept my deepest gratitudes for creating this functional art. Love the idea and execution and can't wait to use it!

dismalaf• 1 year ago

Clippy was peak Windows. Everything went downhill since...

breppp• 1 year ago

They definitely missed on using underlines for headings

rileytg• 1 year 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

https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

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.

UncleNoob• 1 year ago

I’m waiting for BonziBuddy AI

Telemakhos2• 1 year ago

I can't get this to work on my aging 2017 Intel work mac.

Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError

felixrieseberg3• 1 year ago

Ah, shoot, I had an error in my build script. That's now fixed!

https://github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/releases/tag/v0.4.1

Telemakhos2• 1 year ago

Upgraded, but still no joy.

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

AvAn12• 1 year ago

Any love for the other avatars? Power Pup? I think there were a few… Otherwise, thanks, this is great.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

Revenge of the paperclips

margorczynski• 1 year ago

"I can fix him"

raydiak9• 1 year 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.

ants_everywhere2• 1 year ago

is it possible you're not the target audience?

raydiak9• 1 year ago

Which part of my original comment made that a question worth asking? Thought I had already expressed that fairly clearly.

mrandish3• 1 year 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..."

raydiak9• 1 year 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.

volkk• 1 year 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.

raydiak9• 1 year 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.

basch3• 1 year 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 year 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.

raydiak9• 1 year 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.

fallinditch3• 1 year 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.

raydiak9• 1 year 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.

novaRom• 1 year 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?

SLWW• 1 year ago

When do we get the BonziBuddy reskin?

mbowcut2• 1 year ago

Pack it up boys, they finally made the killer app.

ants_everywhere2• 1 year 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 year 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 year ago

I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all

Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle

rukuu001• 1 year ago

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.

byearthithatius2• 1 year 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 year 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.

byearthithatius2• 1 year ago

Yeah I was a tiny little two year old:) Definitely wasn't coding yet hahaha

gus_massa• 1 year 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.

rerdavies• 1 year ago

I still haven't gotten over the trauma of Clippy 1.0.

Hadriel• 1 year ago

Feedback: I think it would be very helpful for users to know ahead of time what kinda performance they can expect based on their system.

amiantos2• 1 year ago

a very basic app getting a bunch of undue attention thanks to nostalgia for someone else's IP, classic

urbandw311er• 1 year ago

You almost sound bitter about it

amiantos2• 1 year 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.

gitroom• 1 year ago

Man, brings back memories I didnt even think I still hadClippy was kinda ridiculous back then but Id 100% mess with this now tbh.

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

Amazing, we also have CowPilot now https://github.com/agentsea/cowpilot

surfingdino2• 1 year ago

And I want a DogCowPilot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

Challenge accepted

endlessvoid94• 1 year ago

Love it.

On macOS it always launches in the middle of the screen - is there a way to move it around?

cbhl• 1 year ago

To move clippy you want to drag the piece of paper on which clippy sits -- clicking clippy himself will hide and show the chat window.

amelius• 1 year ago

Do this one next: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

willejs• 1 year ago

Can this keep popping up, interrupt you, and have the most annoying voice ever added please?

unethical_ban• 1 year 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.

daviding• 1 year ago

A nice addition (unless I missed it) would be to add an existing API key for remote model access?

danielhanchen• 1 year ago

Wow fantastic website!! Love the Windows old aesthetic!

omneity• 1 year 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.

rockemsockem• 1 year 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!!!

dopple• 1 year ago

This is so great! I wrote a short blog post about how well this fits into my Windows 95-inspired bootc project Blue95: https://blues.win/posts/chatting-with-ai-like-its-1995

cocodill• 1 year ago

oh yes, sure, It's not just an another useless shitty electron app, it's object of art. yeah.

hosh3• 1 year ago

I wondered when someone was going to power Clippy with an LLM.

rolph• 1 year ago

i think badgey may reflect the situation better than clippy.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey

davidmurphy• 1 year ago

awesome. I shared this with colleagues at the Computer History Museum!!

quantum_state• 1 year ago

quite cute

awesome_dude• 1 year ago

We've all been thinking it :)

sen• 1 year 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.

shmerl• 1 year ago

What about Skippy?

andwrobs• 1 year ago

Flawless execution, all the details are sharp. That's fun.

ninetyninenine• 1 year ago

Clippy was ahead of it's time. We all had no idea.

uptownfunk• 1 year 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

insane_dreamer• 1 year 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?"

webprofusion• 1 year ago

Microsoft should buy this for $3B

alanh• 1 year ago

That’s great! ... Where are the downloaded models so I can delete them or at least exclude them from Time Machine backups? (Mac)

integricho• 1 year ago

given it's targeted look, why isn't it an actual native app?

patrick4urcloud• 1 year ago

nice ! This time it's working better than the original.

King-Aaron• 1 year ago

Needs a Bonzai Buddy to go with it!

devilsbabe• 1 year 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

tungolcild• 1 year ago

Finally!

quaintdev• 1 year ago

That's a ghost of Clippy. It's not reacting at all!

TanYuho• 1 year ago

This app is so much fun—it really brings back memories of when I used Windows 98 as a kid.

unixhero• 1 year 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

codebolt2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

no front, but your comment reads a little bit like it was written by an LLM trying to push usage of LLMs^^

codebolt2• 1 year ago

Maybe I've been chatting with them so much I'm starting to sound like one myself.

tommica• 1 year 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

timvdalen• 1 year ago

I honestly might keep this running just to have clippy always on top, without using the chat at all...

jeroenhd• 1 year 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.

nonethewiser2• 1 year ago

That has a lot of potential. Give it a normal demeanor that progressively gets more aggressive and hostile towards the user.

makapuf2• 1 year ago

Synergies with a useful assistant for code seem relevant : https://vigor.sourceforge.net/

akx• 1 year ago

https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs exists...

mananaysiempre• 1 year ago

I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself)

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.)

surfingdino2• 1 year ago

Great idea. While someone's at it, could they please hook it up to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_MultiPoint_Mouse for that extra bit of madness?

minkeymaniac• 1 year ago

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

fun times

hedora• 1 year ago

After playing with LLM clippy for about 30 minutes, I realized I really want it to support tool use.

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.)

sachahjkl• 1 year ago

"made with Electron" bruh cmon

GTP• 1 year ago

Decades later, you made a version of Clippy that might actually be useful. Congratulations!

dhruv3006• 1 year ago

This is so cute!

nonethewiser2• 1 year 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.

makapuf2• 1 year ago

Chicago style ?

Tossrock• 1 year ago

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Pixel_UI

ciaranmca• 1 year ago

Nice project! Looks good and seems like something I’d genuinely want to use day to day.

tootyskooty• 1 year 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.

elzbardico• 1 year ago

Am I the only one who thinks that albeit ugly, this is way more readable than the usual web-app styled chat interfaces?

okokwhatever• 1 year ago

agree

chenster• 1 year ago

Can it run Deepseek?

badmonster• 1 year ago

that's cute

xbartu• 1 year ago

Such a great theme, I missed it. I don't see ollama support tho :(

Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

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