Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

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.

That has a lot of potential. Give it a normal demeanor that progressively gets more aggressive and hostile towards the user.

https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs exists...

Synergies with a useful assistant for code seem relevant : https://vigor.sourceforge.net/

> I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself)

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.)

Great idea. While someone's at it, could they please hook it up to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_MultiPoint_Mouse for that extra bit of madness?

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

fun times

After playing with LLM clippy for about 30 minutes, I realized I really want it to support tool use.

That and an appropriate system prompt could get pretty close to vigor from User Friendly.

http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/20000104...

(and, of course pico-chu for the noobs.)