Two months ago, Columbia University undergrad‑turned‑dropout Chungin “Roy” Lee live‑streamed himself acing an Amazon coding interview while a secret browser window spoon‑fed him the answers.
The video went viral, Columbia suspended him, and naturally, venture capitalists showered his newborn startup, Cluely, with $5.3 million to help the rest of us “cheat on everything.”
Lee isn’t an outlier; he’s a preview.
From résumés to regulatory filings, the temptation to outsource “thinking” to AI is baked into the modern stack.
The only real question is how employers and society will draw the guardrails.
Cluely’s pitch is simple: an invisible overlay that pipes in AI‑generated answers during interviews, sales calls, even math exams. At $60 a month, Lee says it’s already sprinting past $3 million in annual revenue.
Critics call it the “Black Mirror Chrome extension.” Lee prefers “the calculator for knowledge work,” another tool employers will eventually accept, like spell‑check or Grammarly.
Just 18 months ago, using a generative AI “copilot” was basically a parlor trick, like asking ChatGPT to write a witty out-of-office reply. Now it’s everywhere, drafting emails and whispering answers to interview questions and school tests.
So, who blinks first: employees wielding clandestine copilots, or employers scrambling to preserve a level playing field?
Employees say it’s not cheating
This isn’t new—it’s been brewing for years. Two years ago, in an April 2023 Reddit thread on r/csmajors, a computer-science major shrugged:
“Half the problems asked in technicals (coding interviews) can be solved in like three seconds with ChatGPT.”
In other words, using a language model isn’t “cheating” — it’s simply the normal workflow for a modern engineer accustomed to Googling and pasting snippets all day.
Lee, the Columbia dropout-turned-founder, pushes the same narrative.
After live-streaming himself cruising through Amazon’s notoriously difficult interview with an AI teleprompter, he told investors that his app “just levels the playing field — exactly like calculators did for math.”
Annie Lux, a career coach who preps hundreds of software engineers a year, agrees that the old rituals no longer map to real work:
“Timed coding tests were never truly realistic; AI just pulled back the curtain,” she told Business Insider for a piece about the “broken” tech hiring process.
Employers crack down
Amazon’s recruiters clearly weren’t happy about what Lee did.
They now open every tech interview with a warning:
“Please do not use GenAI tools during your interview … Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in disqualification.”
The company argues that AI gives candidates “an unfair advantage” and prevents evaluators from seeing authentic skills.
But if everyone else is bringing their AI sidekick to work, not using one can be an act of self-sabotage.
And if Amazon, one of the most technically advanced companies in the world, is fighting this battle, what happens when this trend spills into other jobs that keep the lights on and the bridges safe?
What happens when electricians ace the National Electrical Code Exam thanks to ChatGPT? Or long-haul truckers start leaning on AI to breeze through the Commercial Driver’s License test?
The day AI tools can talk anyone through the trickiest certification questions, every licensing body becomes a potential front in the cheating wars.
A cottage industry emerges
Seventy-six percent of U.S. hiring managers now say AI makes it harder to judge whether a candidate is authentic, per one survey.
In response, a cottage industry of “interview integrity” tools is exploding: eye-tracking webcams, keystroke biometrics, and LLM-based plagiarism detectors that flag suspicious answer latency.1
But that same survey found that 80% of hiring managers want employees with AI skills.
So where does that leave us?
Jeffrey Spector, president of Karat, the world’s largest interviewing company, says the share of interviewees his firm tags as likely cheaters has quintupled in two years.
But rather than blacklisting the cheaters, the company is now redesigning its entire process so using AI isn’t considered cheating. It’s a core part of how engineers do their job.
And this trend may start with coding jobs, but it’ll spread to all knowledge work.
If Amazon or Meta wants to screen for AI use (or see what a candidate can do with AI), expect banks, hospitals and city agencies to follow suit.
What's happening now isn’t just about policing developers — it's about the evolution of testing human intelligence in the world with AI.
Google’s latest prototype smart glasses, unveiled by Android XR chief Shahram Izadi at TED 2025, finally make the decade‑old “Glasshole” dream look plausible.
The frames resemble normal eyewear, yet a wafer‑thin display streams Gemini’s multimodal brain into your field of view.2
In the live demo, product manager Nishtha Bhatia asked the glasses to translate a Spanish street sign, then — on audience demand — into Farsi. Later, the agent recalled where she’d left her hotel key card, thanks to Project Astra’s continuous video memory.
Why does this matter for our employee‑vs‑employer cold war?
Well, today’s interview cheaters juggle hidden windows. Tomorrow, they’ll just glance left for LeetCode3 hints or real‑time SQL syntax. No screen‑share policy can police a lens that looks like prescription glass.
Companies have two options: escalate detection or accept augmented cognition and AI collaboration.
For workers, the line between productivity booster and ethical landmine blurs further: Is an on‑lens translation caption a disability aid, or unfair advantage?
As hardware shrinks and on‑device LLMs get cheaper, the debate will move from whether to allow wearable AI to which guardrails accompany it.
Either way, your next monitor may sit on your nose.
Crosswalk cameo: A widely shared video on X shows a California intersection’s walk signal speaking in AI‑generated Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg voices, sparking both sidewalk giggles and fresh questions about deepfake pranks.
Polite Powerbill: Sam Altman jokes that OpenAI spends “tens of millions” on courtesy tokens, while Wharton’s Ethan Mollick shares data showing “please/thanks” boosts some answers and tanks others. So etiquette may just be a feel‑good splurge, per their X posts.
Agent Inbox: Developer James Campbell’s viral X mock‑up shows iMessage threads with memory‑enabled AI personas — Laundry Buddy, GPT Doctor, Physics Tutor. He argues the GPT Store will stay flat until bots get phone numbers, persistence and agency.
