Clicky: An AI Teacher That Lives on Your Desktop

If you've ever wanted a coding tutor that’s always there, doesn’t judge your messy terminal history, and runs locally on your machine, Clicky might be worth a look. It’s not another cloud-based copilot. It’s a desktop app that acts like an AI teacher, ready to help you understand what you’re doing wrong, why something works, or how to improve your code.

No web browser needed. No subscription for basic use. Just download, run, and ask.

What It Does

Clicky is an open source AI teaching assistant that lives in your menu bar (or system tray). You can ask it questions about code, explain errors, or request step-by-step tutorials. It uses local LLM models (like Ollama or Llama) to keep everything private and offline if you want. The interface is minimal: a chat window that pops up when you click the icon.

It’s not designed to write your code for you. It’s designed to teach you. So instead of giving you a finished function, it might explain the concept, show an example, or walk through the logic. You learn, then you build.

Why It’s Cool

The big deal here is the “teacher” framing. Most AI tools want to complete your work. Clicky wants to make you better at your work. That shift in design shows up in small ways:

• It can ask you clarifying questions instead of just guessing.
• It refuses to give straight up copy paste answers unless you explicitly ask for a solution.
• It keeps a history so you can revisit past lessons.
• Everything runs locally so you can use it with proprietary code without leaking anything.

The developer built it with Rust and Tauri, so it’s lightweight and cross platform. The codebase is well organized and open for contributions if you want to hack on it.

How to Try It

You can grab the latest release from the GitHub repo:

https://github.com/farzaa/clicky

There are prebuilt binaries for macOS and Linux. Windows support is experimental but coming along. You’ll need Ollama (or another local LLM backend) running in the background if you want the offline mode. If you just want to test it with an API key for a cloud model, that works too.

Clone the repo, check the README for setup steps, and you’ll be chatting with your AI teacher in a few minutes.

Final Thoughts

Clicky is early stage but it has the right philosophy. It treats AI as a tutor rather than a code generator. If you’re learning a new language, debugging a tricky edge case, or just want to think through a problem with someone that never gets bored, this can be a solid addition to your dev toolkit.

Worth a star on GitHub and a few minutes of your time.

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