Hit and Fix AI

Inspiration

Remember when old TVs would glitch, and your grandparents would just give them a good smack to fix them? That oddly satisfying moment when percussive maintenance actually worked? We wanted to bring that visceral, physical satisfaction into the age of AI.

As AI becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, we often find ourselves frustrated with incorrect or unsatisfactory responses. The traditional approach is to retype your question or add clarifications - but what if you could just... hit it?

That's where hitAndFixAI was born. We combined nostalgia (Windows XP aesthetic), novel interaction design (physical screen tapping), and modern AI (Google's Gemini) to create something both functional and fun.

What it does

Hit and Fix AI is a chat interface for Google's Gemini AI with a unique twist: when the AI gives you a wrong answer, you can literally hit your MacBook screen, and the app will detect the impact through the lid angle sensor and automatically ask the AI to reconsider its response.

Key Features:

Physical Interaction: Real-time lid angle monitoring detects screen hits
Windows XP Nostalgia: Classic blue sky gradient, XP window chrome, and retro UI elements
Rich Text Support: Full Markdown rendering with bold, italic, code blocks, and lists

Challenges we ran into

Hardware Access on macOS MacBook sensors are typically restricted. We integrated the pybooklid library but had to implement robust connection retry logic and graceful failure handling.
Markdown Rendering in Tkinter Tkinter lacks native Markdown support. Solution: Built a custom parser using regex and tkinter Text widget tags to handle bold, italic, code, lists, and headers.