Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
99 comments
·May 6, 2025mrandish
nightski
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...
freedomben
> 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
yeah, make it give edgy suggestions like: Do you want to find a new job?
pragma_x
There's a lot of missed opportunities out there. For example, AskJeeves is still just a vanilla search engine (Google front-end).
indrora
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
Customers I build AI chat features for also liken it to clippy. I think it’s a very common association.
dylan604
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.
baxtr
Are these retro UIs trending right now? I think it’s the second time I see something like this this week.
Also: I really wonder how young people react to these kind of interfaces. I’m old enough to remember these in real life.
tzury
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
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
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
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
>and give appropriate advice
"It's time to work, Dave"
Henchman21
I’m sorry, I can’t do that Hal
vunderba
We are probably getting closer to that with the newer multimodal LLMs, but you'd almost need to take a screenshot on intervals fed directly to the LLM to provide a sort of chronological context to help it understand what the user is trying to do and gauge the users intentions.
As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
nrmitchi
> 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
So, the Replay feature being slowly rolled out in Win11?
walrus01
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
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.
null
_-_-__-_-_-
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
click and drag on the bottom right corner of clippy to drag
Telemakhos
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
Any love for the other avatars? Power Pup? I think there were a few… Otherwise, thanks, this is great.
alkh
Great job! Having ollama support would be useful as well[1]! [1]https://github.com/ollama/ollama
dehrmann
Can you add narration in Gilbert Gottfried's voice?
rileytg
I recently did this in our main system that we recently added an LLM feature to (for fun internally, not sending to prod) using
hnlmorg
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.
basketbla
Pretty fantastic follow-up to https://www.latent.space/p/clippy-v-anton
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).