Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 sneak Clippy into most of the presentations I give.

Microsoft Bob would be even funnier, you know it.

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).

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

It tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.

what about Links the cat. I used to love it.

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

"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”

And wait for the reactions. If it’s great, announce it as not-a-joke.

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 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.

> I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.

Agreed!

Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

Who can remember clippy right click "animate"?

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.

That, wordart, and the secret flight sim in Excel 97 were the entirety of how I spent my school days.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Or Badgey from Lower Decks

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Badgey

I get the strange feeling you wouldn’t be happy with “New Clippy’s” occasional off topic purchase recommendations!

That might actually be a good idea.