"Cheating on everything" and the opinions from Roy Lee
Why He Might Just Be Right
If you don’t know who Roy Lee is, you’ll probably remember him after seeing this headline. If not, off you go and i’ll wait. Columbia student kicked out of college for cheating raises $5M for AI-powered cheating tool. The 21-year-old who got kicked out of Columbia University for “cheating” on his tests using an AI tool he built himself. Well it’s now a multimillion dollar startup. And Lee? He’s become a lightning rod for everything people love and hate about AI, education, and ambition.
I’ll admit, I found him insufferable at first, his quotes read like a tech bro’s manifesto. But the more I listened, the more I realised that beneath his slick pitch is a blueprint for something bigger, something uncomfortable, something worth paying attention to. Let’s start with the quote that sent him viral.
"I just got kicked out of Columbia for taking a stand against Leetcode interviews."
It’s easy to dismiss this as self-aggrandising, but his point is sharper than it seems. He’s not just railing against technical interviews, he’s questioning the entire premise of how we assess talent. If the goal is to find people who can solve problems, why are we still testing memory and syntax?
Then there’s the Cluely tagline "Cheat on everything." It’s deliberately inflammatory and its a brilliant challenge to the status quo. Roy argues that if AI can help you get the right answer faster, why wouldn’t you use it? We’ve accepted calculators in maths, autocorrect for spelling, why not an all knowing AI invisible to you?
"The future will reward those who embrace technological advantage. When AI assistance becomes universal, the concept of 'cheating' will become obsolete."
This is where he starts to sound less like a rebel and more like a futurist, he’s not just defending his idea and app, he’s predicting a shift in how we define effort, merit, and even intelligence. And he’s not wrong, the tools we call “cheating” today often become tomorrow’s standard. I’ve written before about how I failed essays in high school as I submitted them as typed - due to my handwriting being so poor and I was accused of cheating, well guess what. (and yes this predates the internet and was in the days of Bulletin Boards so finding a high school essay and copying it, what a ludacris idea! anyway I digress.
Still, his tone can be grating
"We’re not hiding from the label. We’re redefining it."
I really dislike this guy, but I can’t argue with him, and this is the kind of thing that must make educators bristle. However, it also forces a necessary conversation, if students are using AI to complete assignments, maybe the problem isn’t the students, maybe it’s the assignments.
His critics say he’s encouraging laziness. But he sees it differently
"Success will be determined not by memorising facts or manual effort, but by leveraging AI to ask the right questions."
This is the kind of thinking that separates him from the average dropout turned founder. He’s not just building a product he’s betting on a new definition of capability, one where knowing how to use tools is more valuable than knowing facts. If you take my concept of “Knowledge in the moment” and realise that we don’t need to know anything anymore we just need to know how to google better than google, we now have the most up to date knowledge we need when we need it.
Of course, the story wouldn’t be complete without the Amazon incident
"An Amazon exec told Columbia: 'Expel this kid or we won’t hire from your school anymore.'"
If true, it’s a damning indictment of how corporate influence shapes academic discipline, it’s not the first report of this kind of corporate bullying and it won’t be the last. What I find really interesting however is it also reveals the threat Cluely and this type of app poses to traditional gatekeepers, if students can ace interviews with AI, what happens to the value of the interview? The recruitment process is already embattled with AI trash: The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun - Ars Technica
"What many saw as a violation of academic integrity became the foundation of a business."
His self-awareness is surprisingly sharp, he’s not pretending to be a victim. He’s saying the quiet part out loud, the rules are outdated, and breaking them might be the only way to prove it. I’ve been saying over and over at events were I’ve been speaking that in the world we live in today the application of AI is only limited by our imagination, and if it can’t do it today, wait six months and it’ll be possible.
And finally, the quote that sums up the entire Cluely experience
"It feels like magic, and it feels like cheating."
That tension between awe and guilt is exactly what makes this app - and those that follow - so powerful. It’s not just a tool, It’s a mirror held up to our assumptions about learning, work, and fairness.
Now, here’s where I think he is really onto something, he’s not just building for students, he’s building for a future where AI is ambient, expected, and embedded in every task. I can see his concept being bought by OpenAI and forming the foundations of whatever their physical device(s) will be.
There’s also a counter opportunity to this which no one has quite mastered just yet, its building tools that detect AI use. As Cluely grows so will the demand for systems that can verify human input, that’s a market in waiting and one that might be just as lucrative.
But here’s a more controversial thought, it’s time to embrace AI and we shouldn’t be trying to detect AI use at all we should just assume its being used. What if exams were open AI (like open book) by default? What if interviews tested collaboration with AI instead of performance without it?
That’s the real provocation in his work, not that he cheated, but that he’s forcing us to ask whether the rules still make sense. And maybe, just maybe, they don’t.
This article was inspired by Roy’s recent appearance on a podcast I subscribe to:
Cheat on Everything: Cluely's Vision for Always-On AI Assistance