Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

admin

May 6, 2025 - 17:00

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Clippy in Action

About Clippy

You might be wondering: What’s the point of all this? Why? Clippy is basically art. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that this little app is all that magnificent or something that belongs in a museum, I mean “art” in the sense that I’ve made it like other people do watercolors or pottery - I made it because building it was fun for me. If you get as little as a small chuckle out of it, I’m happy to hear it.

You can find me on felixrieseberg.com, Blue.sky, or GitHub.

Clippy

You can find the source code for this app on GitHub.

Acknowledgments

I am so grateful to Microsoft - not only for everything they've done for Electron, but also for giving us one of the most iconic characters and designs of computing history.

The entire Electron team for continuing to be wonderful people to build open source with
Kevan Atteberry for Clippy
Jordan Scales (@jdan) for the Windows 98 design
Pooya Parsa (@pi0) for being the (as far as I know) person to extract the length of each frame from the Clippy spritesheet.
node-llama-cpp for squeezing llama.cpp into Node.js

Download Clippy today!

Clippy lets you run a variety of large language models (LLMs) locally on your computer while sticking with a user interface of the 1990s. It's a love letter and homage to the late, great Clippy - and the visual design created by Microsoft in that era.

Simple, familiar, and classic chat interface. Send messages to your models, get a response.
Batteries included: No complicated setup. Just open the app and chat away. Thanks to llama.cpp and node-llama-cpp, the app will automatically discover the most efficient way to run your models (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, etc).
Custom models, prompts, and parameters: Load your own downloaded models and play with the settings.
Offline, local, free: Everything runs on your computers. The only network request Clippy makes is to check for updates (which you can disable).

This app is not affiliated, approved, or supported by Microsoft. 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.

Do you want to download Clippy for your computer?