Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

377 felixrieseberg 100 5/6/2025, 3:02:22 PM felixrieseberg.github.io ↗

Comments (100)

mrandish · 2h ago

Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying.

I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).

freedomben · 2h ago

> I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI.

Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous. Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora

6510 · 1h ago

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

nightski · 1h ago

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

Edit: yes found it.

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

pragma_x · 2h ago

There's a lot of missed opportunities out there. For example, AskJeeves is still just a vanilla search engine (Google front-end).

joeyagreco · 40m ago

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

indrora · 1h ago

I'm firmly of the opinion that if they had shipped what is copilot as Cortana, they'd have seen little to no backlash.

teaearlgraycold · 2h ago

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

dylan604 · 1h ago

I hope you accept that likening how it is intended, and I can't imagine that being a good thing. Clippy was universally panned. To me, I wouldn't be telling people that the thing I'm spending time working on was received as this generation's Clippy.

ants_everywhere · 26m ago

Fun fact: clippy came from Microsoft Bob, which Melinda Gates was the marketing manager for.

I have often wondered what role their relationship played in keeping Clippy around. And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce.

lawlessone · 24m ago

>And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce

I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.

maybelsyrup · 16m ago

> I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all

Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle

tzury · 2h ago

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

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

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

jl6 · 2h ago

IIRC correctly, Clippy’s most famous feature was interrupting you to offer advice. The advice was usually basic/useless/annoying, hence Clippy’s reputation, but a powerful LLM could actually make the original concept work. It would not be simply a chatbot that responds to text, but rather would observe your screen, understand it through a vision model, and give appropriate advice. Things like “did you know there’s an easier way to do what you’re doing”. I don’t think the necessary trust exists yet to do this using public LLM APIs, nor does the hardware to do it locally, but crack either of those and I could see ClipGPT being genuinely useful.

PaulHoule · 2h ago

The way I remember it a lot of software had "help" documentation with full text search in the late 1980s and early 1990s but the common denominator was that it didn't work in the sense that you got useful answers less than 10% of the time. Until Google came along, users got trained to avoid full text search facilities.

The full text facility attached to Clippy really was helpful, getting useful answers around 50% of the time. I thought the whole point of making him an engaging cartoon character was to overcome the prejudice mid-1990s users had towards full-text search in help.

freedomben · 2h ago

It looks like you're writing a letter.

Would you like help?

* Get help with writing the letter

* Just type the letter without help

|_| Don't show me this tip again

GoblinSlayer · 2h ago

>and give appropriate advice

"It's time to work, Dave"

Henchman21 · 1h ago

I’m sorry, I can’t do that Hal

hbn · 43m ago

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

vunderba · 2h ago

We are probably getting closer to that with the newer multimodal LLMs, but you'd almost need to take a screenshot on intervals fed directly to the LLM to provide a sort of chronological context to help it understand what the user is trying to do and gauge the users intentions.

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

johnisgood · 1m ago

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

shudders.

nrmitchi · 2h ago

> As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.

Of the technical, hang-out-on-HN crowd? Ya, probably not many.

Of the other 99.99% of computer users? The majority of them wouldn't even think about it, let alone care. To quote a phrase, ”the user is going to pick dancing pigs over security every time”.

Even without the non-chalent attitude towards security, the majority of the population has been so conditioned that everything they do on a computer is already being sent to 1) Apple, 2) Google, 3) Microsoft, or 4) their employer, that they're burnt-out of caring.

All that is to say that if you can make a widely-available real-time LLM assistant that appeals to non-technical users, please invite me to your private-island-celebrity-filled-yacht-parties.

Henchman21 · 1h ago

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

walrus01 · 2h ago

I think we're well into the paradigm of "hidden employee activity monitoring software" already taking periodic screenshots and sending it to an LLM somewhere, which then generates aggregate performance metrics and dashboards for managers. I've heard of multiple companies working on this for $bigcorp environments, customer service/call center workstation PCs, etc.

6510 · 1h ago

It can still be annoying; I feel it is part of his personality.

It looks like you are writing a comment on Hacker News.

Would you like help with:

- Commas? There shouldn't be one behind "responds to text"

- Capitalization? You've missed a D in "did you know..."

- Punctuation? You've missed a question mark behind "what you’re doing". It goes inside the quotes, of course!

[] Don't ever suggest anything like this ever again.

dehrmann · 4h ago

Can you add narration in Gilbert Gottfried's voice?

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

raydiak · 41m ago

I'm all for these prepackaged local-only AI projects. Much more my speed than corporate cloud services. Real shame this one went down the path of choosing an embodiment that makes me want to shoot holes in my screen. It's even worse than those pixel art cats that chase my cursor on certain blogs. I miss plenty of things about the 90s, but I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to forget how much Clippy is not one of those things. Clippy would be more suitable for a horror game than an assistant. Going out of their way in the README to profusely thank Microsoft for summoning that hellspawn is just icing on the cake.

I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.

mrandish · 2m ago

> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.

This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.

I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Sticking a retro 90s UX on a chat agent that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."

ants_everywhere · 36m ago

is it possible you're not the target audience?

raydiak · 11m ago

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

_-_-__-_-_- · 2h ago

Wow. The ease-of-use is insanely good. I haven't figured out yet how to move clippy to a different location on the screen (rather than centred), but it works well. I have multiple models downloaded and am chatting already!

siryeetey · 1h ago

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

alkh · 4h ago

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

mbowcut2 · 30m ago

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

novaRom · 33m ago

Finally a useful UI for llama.cpp!

Thank you Felix! This is extremely cool! Can you please make a short blog post explaining how is it technically implemented?

SLWW · 31m ago

When do we get the BonziBuddy reskin?

rileytg · 1h ago

I recently did this in our main system that we recently added an LLM feature to (for fun internally, not sending to prod) using

https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs

Jagerbizzle · 4h ago

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

basketbla · 3h ago

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

_pdp_ · 3h ago

Super cool. Serious 90s vibes. I also tried to make a super clippy here. https://chatbotkit.com/examples/super-clippy I think I match the color shema perfectly but does not have the same feeling as the original.

stavros · 3h ago

It's way too high resolution!

PaulHoule · 2h ago

Animations are missing too.

hnlmorg · 1h ago

One of my very first AI projects was in the late 90s and used the Microsoft Agent API (which Clippy uses) as the interface.

It used Merlin rather than Clippy and was extremely basic as AI. But it was a fun project.

sigmaisaletter · 2h ago

It looks like you're talking about a cartoon assistant character. Would you like help?

ICYDN: The proper name of Clippy is actually "Clippit", as introduced in Office 97.

Telemakhos · 1h ago

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

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

AvAn12 · 1h ago

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

0points · 2h ago

Will this properly interrupt me in the middle of flow and ask unrelated questions, or is it just another clippy knock-off?

dr_kiszonka · 2h ago

Funny. But you know, with multimodal models perhaps someone will finally crack when it is appropriate to interrupt someone with a relevant suggestion. I think I would like a personal assistant that would be able to say, "Hey, you have been debugging this one function for 5 hours and you still have 3 more to fix by EOB. Would it make sense to pause for a bit and see if other fixes could be done quickly?"

Aardwolf · 3h ago

It's weird that when clippy was new I found it to be everything that's wrong with UI design, and today I'm nostalgic for it

oneeyedpigeon · 2h ago

Nah, it's not weird. You said it yourself: nostalgia. It's human nature to romanticise the past. I bet you would hate it again if you used it today.

ale42 · 3h ago

Great idea and design, thanks for this! I was hoping since some time to see this :-D

I hope that one day a non-Electron app (to minimize resource usage when idle) will also appear!

elia_42 · 2h ago

Really interesting project. I love the combination of LLM with a 90s aesthetic. Great that it works with a really simple configuration and runs offline

batch12 · 2h ago

Makes me think of this short story.

https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

DigiEggz · 2h ago

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

kuberwastaken · 4h ago

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

aligundogdu · 3h ago

This is such an amazing piece of work — truly impressive! Hats off to you If it supports Ollama and local LLMs too, it'll be absolutely unbeatable!

tasn · 3h ago

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

rhet0rica · 3h ago

Looks like it's a special font provided by https://github.com/jdan/98.css (Which has come a long way in the past couple of years, despite still being 0.1.x)

Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth

Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.

breppp · 2h ago

They definitely missed on using underlines for headings

aussieguy1234 · 1h ago

Revenge of the paperclips

givemeethekeys · 3h ago

Like phoenix, it rises from the ashes..

rangerelf · 3h ago

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

ayaros · 3h ago

I love your website design.

GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago

BonziBuddy next?

roskelld · 1h ago

Followed by Tiny Elvis?

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

dismalaf · 2h ago

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

artursapek · 2h ago

I thought Clippy first shipped in XP

mig39 · 2h ago

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

ummonk · 2h ago

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

ChrisArchitect · 2h ago

Next up, "Rover" the dog from Microsoft Bob

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

margorczynski · 48m ago

"I can fix him"

talkinghead · 3h ago

yes yes yes!!!

rafram · 3h ago

This is cool, but does no one even look at what libraries they're shipping anymore? I mean, why does this Clippy-style LLM interface bundle:

- A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language

- A full GitHub API client

- A library that takes a string and tells you if it's a valid npm package name

- A useless shim for the JavaScript Math module

And 119 other libraries? This thing would have taken up 10% of the maximum disk space available on a Windows 95 FAT16 volume.

felixrieseberg · 3h ago

The real answer is that some of us (the Electron maintainers) have been playing with local LLMs in desktop apps and right now, node-llama-cpp is by far the easiest way to experiment - but it's also not meant for desktop apps and hence has _a lot_ of dependencies.

In general, pruning libraries in Electron isn't as easy as it should be - it's probably something for us to work on.

anaisbetts · 3h ago

So to be clear, your complaint is that the nostalgia Clippy app that puts a cartoon paper clip on your desktop, isn't efficient enough?

rafram · 1h ago

I think it’s legitimate to ask why these dependencies are necessary. LLMs have created whole new classes of vulnerabilities, and things like a GitHub client (which downloads arbitrary data/code) and a templating engine (which executes it) expose an even larger attack surface.

If someone’s going to get RCE on my machine, I don’t want it to be through the silly Clippy LLM UI, you know?

criddell · 3h ago

Maybe it was vibe coded and the libraries were added while going down paths that turned out to be dead ends and the LLM never cleaned up after itself?

coder543 · 3h ago

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

pvg · 3h ago

I think this is explained on the linked project page:

This project isn't trying to be your best chat bot. I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology paired with one the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025.

You might be looking for the more minimalist Grumpy which is hand-hewn from a pure silicon monocrystal.

NitpickLawyer · 3h ago

> A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language

A guess without looking into the code: Jinja templating is used to define how to prompt the model (i.e. system first, then this specific character / token, then user, then if it's a tool prepend this and append that, etc.)

xyc · 1h ago

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

rukuu001 · 8m ago

It was great / depressing to mention Clippy at a recent meetup and see the generational divide between those who groaned and everyone who looked confused.

No comments yet

nullchan · 3h ago

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

maxwell · 3h ago

Correct.

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

VanTheBrand · 2h ago

Actually this says the trademark is pending them proving they are using it and they aren’t so they keep filing extensions. Also it’s limited in scope to word processing (at there is lots of back and forth with the trademark office about that)

muwtyhg · 3h ago

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

pier25 · 3h ago

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

SoftTalker · 3h ago

Trademarks have to actually be used to remain enforceable, I think. Not sure MS could claim Clippy after all this time, not that they might not try.

shrinks99 · 57m ago

Microsoft uses Clippy for the paperclip emoji in the Fluent Emoji set. The trademark is why the open source version of Fluent Emoji doesn't use Clippy's likeness.

mook · 3h ago

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

SoftTalker · 3h ago

Wow, had no idea. Like a bad penny.

mkgeorge7 · 3h ago

Question for the devs in here...something I've been thinking about a lot recently. So I see that OP linked out to a public github repo...but when downloading the actual bundle, what's a quick way for me to determine that what I'm installing on my mac is actually the same as what's in the public repo? It's always seemed like a loophole to me ready for (potential) exploitation.

>> Ship project. >> Link out Github repo on the static site somewhere >> Gain trust instantly as users presume the public repo is what's used behind the scenes

Disclaimer: I'm a web dev and don't know a single thing about native MacOS software

felixrieseberg · 3h ago

Yeah, reproducible builds would be fantastic.

I sign my binaries on macOS with Apple codesign and notarize - and with Microsoft's Azure trusted signing for Windows. Both operating systems will actually show you a lot of warning dialogs before running anything unsigned. It's far from perfect - but I do wish we'd get more into the habit of signing binaries, even if open source.

dec0dedab0de · 3h ago

you don't, that is what reproducible builds are trying to solve, but even then it would still need someone to compile and check.

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

UncleNoob · 1h ago

I’m waiting for BonziBuddy AI

No comments yet

aaroninsf · 2h ago

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

No comments yet

concerndc1tizen · 3h ago

I hope people realize that this is an easy way to get a virus.

Don't install third party software except from highly trusted sources.

raydiak · 2h ago

You sure wouldn't want them spying on you, stealing your data, chewing up your resources for shady profit schemes, or making your machine unbootable. Better to leave that to the experts at Microsoft and FAANG since all those features come preinstalled nowadays.

Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?

gwbas1c · 29m ago

Microsoft Defender didn't find anything

bigbuppo · 1h ago

But BonzaiBuddy is your friend.

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Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

Comments (100)