AI tool comparison
Clicky vs MiniAi
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Productivity
Clicky
AI assistant that lives next to your cursor and reads your screen
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
Clicky is a Mac application that surfaces an AI assistant inline — directly adjacent to your cursor — without requiring you to switch windows or paste context manually. The app maintains persistent screen awareness, reading what's in front of you and using that context to answer questions, guide tasks, and make suggestions relevant to what you're doing in any application. Unlike clipboard-based AI tools that require explicit copy-paste workflows, Clicky works through ambient screen reading: you invoke it with a hotkey, it understands the current screen context automatically, and responds inline. The approach is closer to GitHub Copilot's ghost-text model than a chat sidebar — the assistant lives where your attention already is. The indie approach prioritizes a single, focused Mac use case rather than trying to be a cross-platform agent platform. Early Product Hunt reception highlighted the overlay UI and the speed of context capture as standout experiences. For knowledge workers who context-switch constantly between reference material, documentation, and writing tools, the cursor-adjacent model reduces the friction of asking a question by eliminating the need to describe what you're looking at.
Productivity
MiniAi
Select any text on Mac, press ⌥Space, get AI in a floating panel
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
MiniAi is a macOS menu bar app with exactly one job: explain selected text without breaking your focus. Highlight any text on your Mac — in a PDF, email, code file, web page, or document — press Option+Space, and a floating AI explanation panel appears. No app switching, no copy-paste, no context loss. Built by a medical student who needed to stay in reading flow while looking up terms in research papers, MiniAi uses Claude Haiku under the hood for fast, accurate explanations. The floating panel dismisses with Escape and leaves no trace in your task switcher. The scope is deliberately minimal: one gesture, one action, instant result. No chat history, no threads, no settings overwhelm. Free to use with your own Anthropic API key. Launched today on Product Hunt where it resonated strongly with students, researchers, and professionals who live in document-heavy workflows.
Reviewer scorecard
“The screen-aware context capture is the killer feature — I'm tired of pasting error messages into chat windows. If Clicky accurately reads terminal output and stack traces without me doing anything, that alone justifies the install. The hotkey-invoke pattern feels like the right UX for async assistance.”
“The Option+Space shortcut is muscle memory within 10 minutes. BYOK with Haiku means it's essentially free at typical usage — Haiku is fast and accurate enough for term lookups and quick explanations. The zero-UI-overhead philosophy is exactly right for a tool you invoke 20 times a day.”
“Persistent screen reading is a significant privacy surface. What data is captured, where it goes, and how it's retained are crucial questions that indie tools often underspecify. This space is also crowded — Cursor, Copilot, and a dozen similar tools already compete for this workflow. What's Clicky's durable advantage?”
“Apple's own Writing Tools in macOS 15 already has a 'Summarize' action in the right-click menu, and it's free with no API key. PopClip has been doing triggered text actions for a decade with a rich ecosystem of extensions. MiniAi needs a clearer differentiator beyond the keyboard shortcut.”
“Cursor-adjacent AI is the right mental model for ambient assistance. We've been training users to alt-tab to a chat window for 3 years; tools like Clicky train the reflex that AI is contextually available wherever attention lands. This interaction paradigm will win.”
“Tools like MiniAi are training users to expect ambient AI assistance — intelligence available at any moment without mode-switching. This behavioral shift is significant: once people get used to instant contextual explanation, the bar for every reading and research tool permanently rises.”
“As someone who constantly switches between design specs, documentation, and writing tools, cursor-adjacent AI is genuinely useful. No more describing a UI element in a chat window — Clicky can just see it. The overlay aesthetic is clean and the indie origin means it'll iterate fast on creator feedback.”
“The story behind MiniAi — built by a med student to stay in flow during paper reading — is authentic and the design reflects genuine user empathy. For writers, researchers, and anyone working with dense material, this is the kind of tool you install and forget you installed because it just works.”
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