I thought Cluely was actually a solid idea early on, but over time it felt like it drifted toward pricing, friction, and controversy instead of pure usefulness. That got me wondering if I could build the same core idea, but stripped down, open source, and focused purely on productivity.

OpenAI has a desktop GPT app now, which is great, but it still doesn’t really solve the “don’t break my flow” problem. You end up switching tabs, dragging things around, or copy-pasting context. It’s not bad, but it’s not invisible either.

So I built Julie over a weekend (about 2 days) mostly for fun and to see if I actually could. Julie is a lightweight desktop assistant that lives on top of your workspace, sees what you see, listens when you want it to, and responds without forcing you to context-switch. No cheating angle, no gimmicks, just trying to stay in the same mental lane while you work.

It’s fully open source and costs $0. It uses Groq’s high-throughput inference for text, speech, and vision, and runs as a simple desktop app. It’s not literally invisible or magical, just a practical assistant that reduces task switching instead of adding more UI.

This isn’t meant to replace anything or start drama. I mostly wanted to prove that this kind of assistant can exist without paywalls, subscriptions, or hype. If it’s useful to others, that’s a win.

Repo and installers are up here if anyone wants to try it or poke holes in it.

This is a very minimal version so let me know your thoughts :)

Extremely useful, charging 100s of dollars for these "assistants" is downright outrageous. Praise you for making it open source!