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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora
You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
Clippy was useless.
But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!
It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.
And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
Agreed!
Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is
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
Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
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.
Edit: yes found it.
[1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...
(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)
I don't browse without it these days.
i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone
I also have these Extensions:
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/h...
They can bring back clippy, Cortana, and all the other variants, in classic or modern mode. Hell why not a BonziBuddy knockoff.
An opportunity for Carmen Sandiego as well.
Thanks to the horrific beauty of ActiveX, this even allowed these Agents to be loaded into web pages.
The API was supported up till Windows 7 (though it was an optional component at the time) but still I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself) and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
https://archive.org/details/microsoftagentsoftwaredevelopmen...
> and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
The actual character of Clippy was not included with the Agent SDK (unlike some other options available in Office, like the Wizard), so you’d have to dig it out of an actual copy of Office, or get it from someone who already did so:
https://archive.org/details/clippitMS
(Was the WinXP search dog also an Agent character? I never guessed that for some reason.)
fun times
After all it was requested almost daily over at x.com
https://x.com/search?q=ai%20bring%20clippy%20back&src=typed_...
I have often wondered what role their relationship played in keeping Clippy around. And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce.
I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.
Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle
The full text facility attached to Clippy really was helpful, getting useful answers around 50% of the time. I thought the whole point of making him an engaging cartoon character was to overcome the prejudice mid-1990s users had towards full-text search in help.
Would you like help?
* Get help with writing the letter
* Just type the letter without help
|_| Don't show me this tip again
As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
Of the technical, hang-out-on-HN crowd? Ya, probably not many.
Of the other 99.99% of computer users? The majority of them wouldn't even think about it, let alone care. To quote a phrase, ”the user is going to pick dancing pigs over security every time”.
Even without the non-chalent attitude towards security, the majority of the population has been so conditioned that everything they do on a computer is already being sent to 1) Apple, 2) Google, 3) Microsoft, or 4) their employer, that they're burnt-out of caring.
All that is to say that if you can make a widely-available real-time LLM assistant that appeals to non-technical users, please invite me to your private-island-celebrity-filled-yacht-parties.
shudders.
Wait, are you really looking this up? You don't even know how to do this? Are you kidding me?
Gosh, it's been an hour and you still haven't fixed this bug? Are you retarded or something? You don't deserve this job.
That said, if we could automate it, it might free up more of my brain for productivity…
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.
"It's time to work, Dave"
Pretty soon I won’t even need biological memory.
It looks like you are writing a comment on Hacker News.
Would you like help with:
- Commas? There shouldn't be one behind "responds to text"
- Capitalization? You've missed a D in "did you know..."
- Punctuation? You've missed a question mark behind "what you’re doing". It goes inside the quotes, of course!
[] Don't ever suggest anything like this ever again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
I wish this sort of style had a more specific name and could be decoupled from the desktop a bit more.
Would love to see a native webpage inspired by windows 2000 or similar. I've struggled to find a name for it.
ICYDN: The proper name of Clippy is actually "Clippit", as introduced in Office 97.
The general idea is awesome though, and a lot more fun than just having a quake-terminal to interface with local LLMs via ollama.
https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs
It used Merlin rather than Clippy and was extremely basic as AI. But it was a fun project.
I feel like a text editor + clippy would be an even more potent combo! After all, that was clippy's original context.
Thank you Felix! This is extremely cool! Can you please make a short blog post explaining how is it technically implemented?
I have a 3090gtx, but never actually run/hosted any locally.
Cheers
I hope that one day a non-Electron app (to minimize resource usage when idle) will also appear!
Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth
Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.
> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
https://github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/releases/tag/v0.4.1
https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey
On macOS it always launches in the middle of the screen - is there a way to move it around?
https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/tiny-elvis/
I like the idea, though.
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-i...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6umxhkdKzSY&t=79s
- A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language
- A full GitHub API client
- A library that takes a string and tells you if it's a valid npm package name
- A useless shim for the JavaScript Math module
And 119 other libraries? This thing would have taken up 10% of the maximum disk space available on a Windows 95 FAT16 volume.
In general, pruning libraries in Electron isn't as easy as it should be - it's probably something for us to work on.
If someone’s going to get RCE on my machine, I don’t want it to be through the silly Clippy LLM UI, you know?
A guess without looking into the code: Jinja templating is used to define how to prompt the model (i.e. system first, then this specific character / token, then user, then if it's a tool prepend this and append that, etc.)
This project isn't trying to be your best chat bot. I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology paired with one the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025.
You might be looking for the more minimalist Grumpy which is hand-hewn from a pure silicon monocrystal.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90782096&caseSearchType=U...
>> Ship project. >> Link out Github repo on the static site somewhere >> Gain trust instantly as users presume the public repo is what's used behind the scenes
Disclaimer: I'm a web dev and don't know a single thing about native MacOS software
I sign my binaries on macOS with Apple codesign and notarize - and with Microsoft's Azure trusted signing for Windows. Both operating systems will actually show you a lot of warning dialogs before running anything unsigned. It's far from perfect - but I do wish we'd get more into the habit of signing binaries, even if open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
Don't install third party software except from highly trusted sources.
Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?
I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.
This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.
I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Giving a chat agent a retro 90s UX that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."
The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.
Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.
Ah, well that does explain why you have some... baggage. My experience was different as I wasn't supporting or interfacing regularly back then with anyone who wasn't tech savvy. I endured Clippy for about 30 seconds, realized it was a stupid idea only a big corporation would think was cool or useful, turned it off and moved on with my day.
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.
this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane product.
You link your os to a local or cloud llm, and a local program asking the OS for a response and can’t even tell which one you’re using or whether it’s on the machine or not. It should all be abstracted away.
... but I think we may be heading for a new 'golden age' of web animation and gratuitous creativity. Personally, I'm happy to see more crazy animated stuff, it's the corporate dark patterns and bad UX that I hate.
Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).
Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.
Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.