[shin_lao]

To me the problem with Clippy is that he never gave useful help and annoyed me when I didn't ask for anything.

Imagine, you're at your desk. Someone comes up: "Hey I see you're at your desk, do you need help with sitting on your chair?".

Don't help someone who doesn't ask for help.

[ajuc]

I think the worse part of clippy was that it wasn't predictable. I want my tools to be predictable, I want to have complete mental model of what will happen when I do sth. And it should be as small model, as possible.

Clippy appeared at random intervals interrupting me, and almost never were useful. And even if it was - I can only guess what caused it to appear, so I still won't know how to make it do the same thing again. So I couldn't integrate it into my mental model of application.

So it was just very infuriating interruption.

The same problem is with autocorrect. I hate this thing.

[TeMPOraL]

> Don't help someone who doesn't ask for help.

I never understood this attitude.

IF (and only if) your help would very likely be useful and you know how to approach the person, then, why not?

As for the software angle, Clippy was indeed dumb and rarely offered useful help (partially because, as one of the comments above states, some boss forced engineers to replace a good algorithm with a more business suitable algorithm). But in general, I subscribe to the idea that software should be less interactive and guess more (and let you correct it, if the guesses were wrong).

[shin_lao]

The thing is the even if your help is useful (which you don't know), helping someone who doesn't ask for it will most likely hurt his pride.