San Francisco’s streets are plastered with inscrutable B2B billboards, a reflection of a city utterly consumed by tech ambition. Among the most hated advertisers is Cluely, a glitchy AI tool by Columbia dropout Chungin “Roy” Lee that helps users cheat in meetings. Its presence sparks visible disgust, a rare reaction in a landscape saturated with absurd startup propaganda.

This vitriol seems disproportionate until you consider the deeper schism Lee represents. His tool is just another form of widespread AI use—San Francisco cafes already overflow with workers pasting ChatGPT output. The hypocrisy mirrors past excesses, like the $120 million wasted on the Juicero. The real target isn’t the product’s quality, but the personality it champions.

Silicon Valley’s new doctrine prizes not traditional intelligence but extreme agency. The highly agentic are bulldozers who act without permission, a trait now explicitly screened for in interviews. This shift renders old skills obsolete; as AI writes a quarter of Google’s code, reflection and creativity become liabilities. The future belongs to those with an innate drive to execute, not to think.

Lee’s mythology—entering Columbia to find a co-founder, not an education—epitomizes this. He built Interview Coder to cheat on LeetCode, dismissing its puzzles as pointless. His story isn't about a single bad tool but a fundamental change: the displacement of cognitive work itself, leaving a world where the ability to simply *do* is the only remaining human advantage.