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).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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?"
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
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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) -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?"
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?
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.
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 :)
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)
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)
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.)
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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..."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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.
Or Badgey from Lower Decks
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
> 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.
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.
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 think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.
Agreed!
Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
I sneak Clippy into most of the presentations I give.
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.
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.
Friends don't let friends use comic sans, papyrus or it's imitators IMHO.
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).
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.
So going by https://rodneybrooks.com/rodney-brooks-three-laws-of-robotic...
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.
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.
It tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.
"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?"
It should at least have been an April fools joke. “Microsoft renames copilot for MS word as Clippy’s Pilot”
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
Who can remember clippy right click "animate"?
That, wordart, and the secret flight sim in Excel 97 were the entirety of how I spent my school days.
What, no Encarta? :P
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.
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.
And wait for the reactions. If it’s great, announce it as not-a-joke.
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.
what about Links the cat. I used to love it.
Microsoft Bob would be even funnier, you know it.
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.
yeah, make it give edgy suggestions like: Do you want to find a new job?
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...
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
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.
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.
> 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
Strong recommend for Android, Firefox and uBlock Origin
I also have these Extensions:
Privacy Badger and UBlock Origin don't work well together, and LocalCDN is better than Decentraleyes
Nah, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin do work well together.
Sorry didn't notice, it was the top google result. I have ublock origin and firefox so I tend not to see many ads.
>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.
There's a lot of missed opportunities out there. For example, AskJeeves is still just a vanilla search engine (Google front-end).
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?
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...
I'm firmly of the opinion that if they had shipped what is copilot as Cortana, they'd have seen little to no backlash.
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.
Just had ChatGPT make this: https://ibb.co/pB4SPJBW
Am I right to feel wary of clicking this link? My spidy sense says 'don't do it'.
it's an ibb.co link; ibb.co is just an free online image host (the link lets you preview the uploaded image)
Early on I gave it a custom instruction:
That's a fantastic question! I see you think like a pro!
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.
Might as well bring back the entire Microsoft BoB interface as well
That’s a lot of hate you’re channeling there.
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."
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!!
Customers I build AI chat features for also liken it to clippy. I think it’s a very common association.
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.
Clippy was panned because it was intrusive and offered very little real help, but the design and concept themselves were always popular.
you just described modern LLM bots as well
When talking with them I was surprised because they seemed to be invoking his name positively.
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.
> 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.)
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.)
That has a lot of potential. Give it a normal demeanor that progressively gets more aggressive and hostile towards the user.
Synergies with a useful assistant for code seem relevant : https://vigor.sourceforge.net/
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
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?
https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs exists...
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_...
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.
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.
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.
Yeah this is not even faster horses. It's horses that can count like Clever Hans.
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.
>And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce
I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.
> I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all
Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle
Or Melinda.
Can you add narration in Gilbert Gottfried's voice?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
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.
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.
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
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?
Always reminds me of this short - https://youtu.be/86KduX_HaPs
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.
> 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.
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)
> I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM
shudders.
So, the Replay feature being slowly rolled out in Win11?
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.
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.
You might look into vigor, a mean-spirited version of clippy for the vi editor.
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…
>and give appropriate advice
"It's time to work, Dave"
I’m sorry, I can’t do that Hal
> 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.
Microsoft infamously is adding AI to Windows to constantly watch your screen and people understandably are not super excited for it.
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.
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
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.
That's exactly what recall was and is
You missed the "for now" at the end of that sentence.
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 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.
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Pixel_UI
Chicago style ?
Great job! Having ollama support would be useful as well[1]! [1]https://github.com/ollama/ollama
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.
Am I the only one who thinks that albeit ugly, this is way more readable than the usual web-app styled chat interfaces?
agree
Man do I ever miss this UI design. Nice work!
Go contribute to SerenityOS then!
Amazing, we also have CowPilot now https://github.com/agentsea/cowpilot
And I want a DogCowPilot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
Challenge accepted
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.
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!
click and drag on the bottom right corner of clippy to drag
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.
no front, but your comment reads a little bit like it was written by an LLM trying to push usage of LLMs^^
Maybe I've been chatting with them so much I'm starting to sound like one myself.
Pretty fantastic follow-up to https://www.latent.space/p/clippy-v-anton
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.
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
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?
Microsoft should buy this for $3B
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.
It's way too high resolution!
Animations are missing too.
When do we get the BonziBuddy reskin?
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
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.
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
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.
Nice project! Looks good and seems like something I’d genuinely want to use day to day.
That's a ghost of Clippy. It's not reacting at all!
Decades later, you made a version of Clippy that might actually be useful. Congratulations!
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.
Will this properly interrupt me in the middle of flow and ask unrelated questions, or is it just another clippy knock-off?
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?"
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
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?
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.
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.
Yeah I was a tiny little two year old:) Definitely wasn't coding yet hahaha
Is it insane that I tried to make a version of this exactly a week ago!? This is freakin awesome, congratulations!
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 :)
This app is so much fun—it really brings back memories of when I used Windows 98 as a kid.
I wondered when someone was going to power Clippy with an LLM.
Wow fantastic website!! Love the Windows old aesthetic!
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!!!
I still haven't gotten over the trauma of Clippy 1.0.
I love the terrible font rendering! Is it a special font, or some CSS?
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.
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)
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
Ah, shoot, I had an error in my build script. That's now fixed!
https://github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/releases/tag/v0.4.1
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
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.
Man, brings back memories I didnt even think I still hadClippy was kinda ridiculous back then but Id 100% mess with this now tbh.
Makes me think of this short story.
https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
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
Pack it up boys, they finally made the killer app.
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!
A nice addition (unless I missed it) would be to add an existing API key for remote model access?
i think badgey may reflect the situation better than clippy.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
Accept my deepest gratitudes for creating this functional art. Love the idea and execution and can't wait to use it!
Can this keep popping up, interrupt you, and have the most annoying voice ever added please?
awesome. I shared this with colleagues at the Computer History Museum!!
Any love for the other avatars? Power Pup? I think there were a few… Otherwise, thanks, this is great.
Love it.
On macOS it always launches in the middle of the screen - is there a way to move it around?
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.
That’s great! ... Where are the downloaded models so I can delete them or at least exclude them from Time Machine backups? (Mac)
This is so cute!
I love your website design.
BonziBuddy next?
Followed by Tiny Elvis?
https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/tiny-elvis/
nice ! This time it's working better than the original.
I honestly might keep this running just to have clippy always on top, without using the chat at all...
They definitely missed on using underlines for headings
Flawless execution, all the details are sharp. That's fun.
This is a thing of beauty, thank you!! :-D
Like phoenix, it rises from the ashes..
"made with Electron" bruh cmon
Finally!
Needs a Bonzai Buddy to go with it!
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?"
Clippy was ahead of it's time. We all had no idea.
What about Skippy?
given it's targeted look, why isn't it an actual native app?
We've all been thinking it :)
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.
a very basic app getting a bunch of undue attention thanks to nostalgia for someone else's IP, classic
You almost sound bitter about it
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.
Awesome! Now I just want Perplexity to acquire the AskJeeves brand.
Revenge of the paperclips
Clippy was peak Windows. Everything went downhill since...
I thought Clippy first shipped in XP
You may be mixing it up with the explorer search dog. Whose name was Rover, apparently.
aw he was so cute
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.
Next up, "Rover" the dog from Microsoft Bob
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-i...
I was more a fan of "The Dot", especially when it morphed into a Picasso face:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6umxhkdKzSY&t=79s
quite cute
yes yes yes!!!
"I can fix him"
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
People have been perfectly capable of making that mistake themselves since long before "vibe coding" existed.
> 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.)
It seems that this is possibly not necessary, since LLaMA.cpp already integrates Jinja with CPP implementation (through minja)
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.
Do this one next: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
Pretty sure Clippy is trademarked. Had the same idea but did not go through with it because of the TM.
Correct.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90782096&caseSearchType=U...
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)
The character is actually named Clippit. Although maybe MS trademarked Clippy after it became the more common name.
I seriously doubt Microsoft would enforce it for a non-commercial side project.
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.
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...
Wow, had no idea. Like a bad penny.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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I’m waiting for BonziBuddy AI
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"...they didn't stop to think if they should.”
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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.
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?
Parent is giving general advice and you are calling it a "baseless attack". Grow some skin dude.
Microsoft Defender didn't find anything
But BonzaiBuddy is your friend.
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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.
> 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..."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
is it possible you're not the target audience?
Which part of my original comment made that a question worth asking? Thought I had already expressed that fairly clearly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.