Pluely – open-source alternative to Cluely (~10MB, Always On Display)
Hey HN, A bit of backstory: I was job hunting for months, applying everywhere and racking up a ton of rejections. It got frustrating, so I decided to flip the script and build something useful instead: an open-source take on Cluely, that popular stealth AI tool from the $15M company. I figured why not recreate something that's already out there and buzzing, but make it free, transparent, and way better for privacy. Plus, it felt like a fun challenge. This is actually my first project ever using Tauri, and I'm hooked. I started out trying Electron, but it just wasn't cutting it for something…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, A bit of backstory: I was job hunting for months, applying everywhere and racking up a ton of rejections. It got frustrating, so I decided to flip the script and build something useful instead: an open-source take on Cluely, that popular stealth AI tool from the $15M company. I figured why not recreate something that's already out there and buzzing, but make it free, transparent, and way better for privacy. Plus, it felt like a fun challenge. This is actually my first project ever using Tauri, and I'm hooked. I started out trying Electron, but it just wasn't cutting it for something that needs to be fast and reliable - Electron apps end up bloated with all that browser overhead, sucking up RAM and starting slow, which kills the whole "instant access" vibe I was going for. Tauri, with its Rust core, keeps things lean and snappy without any of that extra weight. Anyway, Pluely is a super lightweight desktop app, just ~10MB (that's 27 times smaller than Cluely), designed to give you real-time AI help during video calls, interviews, sales talks, or pretty much any chat, all without anyone spotting it and without real-time meeting transcription(can add it based on the response). Here's what makes it tick: An undetectable overlay: It's a see-through window that floats over any app like Zoom or Teams, and it stays hidden in screen shares, recordings, or screenshots. Support for multiple LLMs: Hooks up to OpenAI models like GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude, Google Gemini, or xAI Grok. It pulls the models dynamically, and everything runs off your own API keys stored right on your device - no servers or middlemen. Flexible inputs: Type stuff in, speak naturally (using Whisper for speech-to-text and voice detection so it just picks up when you talk), or toss in images and screenshots for the AI to break down. Privacy and speed first: All processing is local, it uses half the CPU and RAM of similar tools, built on Tauri plus React. No tracking, no data leaving your machine. Conversation history: Kept locally so you can pick up where you left off. Works everywhere: Grab it as a .dmg for macOS, .msi for Windows, or .deb for Linux. It's killer for stuff like nailing job interviews with discreet tips, debugging code on the spot in tech meetings, or getting strategy nudges during negotiations. Unlike the original Cluely, this one's totally free, you can tweak it however you want, and it's all out in the open. Download now on GitHub releases: https://github.com/iamsrikanthnani/pluely/releases I'd love your thoughts, especially on adding custom LLM providers or tweaking the voice detection. What else would you want in a stealth AI sidekick?
Does the same job
all alternatives →- SLsoft-launching one of my pet projects2011 · ▲27
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
- ALAI-Less Hacker News2023 · save-buffer.github.io · ▲69
Lately I've felt exhausted due to the deluge of AI/GPT posts on hacker news, and have seen similar grumblings. I threw together this frontend that filters out anything with the phrases AI, LLM, GPT, or LLaMa for use until the hype dies down a bit. Before anyone asks, yes I did try to use ChatGPT to help, and while the code it provided was helpful, it needed some heavy bug-fixing. Edit: One other note I forgot to mention. The favicon is generated by Stable Diffusion, I asked it to generate an "Aritificial Intelligence Favicon", and then I added the red circle with line through it.
- IMI made an open-source Replit2024 · github.com · ▲9
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
- IBI Built a Paul Graham AI Advisor for Founders and Hackers2025 · paulgraham.resurrect.space · ▲21
Hey, just wanted to share with you guys and app that I built and deployed in a day with Lovable. So, as a founder I always wanted to have an advisor but my budget would always be less, then on the other hand hand I had Paul's essays on Startup Advice, which I never read because I was busy building stuff. Hence, I built this product which comes into a sweet spot of both at the same time being more reasonable and capable than the alternative. ps: it's running on a reasoning model and tbh I've been able to gather pretty good insights from it. Note to PG: If you're seeing this. I'm your big fan.…
- WOWorking on open-source perplexity AI2024 · omniplex.vercel.app · ▲5
Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…
- IBI built an AI that roasts your website and gives tips to fix itSep 2025 · ai-roast-vert.vercel.app · ▲7
Hi HN I built a fun little tool: It uses Groq’s LLaMA 3.3 + Puppeteer to analyze a website Then it roasts the design/content/UX with humor And finishes with 3–5 genuinely helpful improvement tips You can try it here: https://ai-roast-vert.vercel.app I wanted to: Practice fast idea-to-launch cycle (built in 2 days) Experiment with a viral-friendly product Monetize with a $0.55 pro version that gives a detailed roast + download Would love your feedback — on the idea, the tone, the usefulness — anything! Thanks in advance
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
- IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
- KT
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IW
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
- TC
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca