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Everyone saw Roy Lee’s viral stunt with “Cluely,” the invisible app designed to secretly ace coding interviews. He pissed off Columbia, Amazon, and pretty much everyone else—but let’s skip past the controversy. I tore apart the app to see how it works, and turns out, the tech itself is genuinely interesting.

How Cluely Actually Works (Technical Breakdown)

Roy built Cluely using Electron, a desktop app framework based on Chromium and Node.js, to create a transparent, always-on-top overlay:

• Transparent Window (transparent: true) – This Electron BrowserWindow property ensures the background is fully transparent, showing only explicitly rendered content.
• Always On Top (alwaysOnTop: true) – Electron’s flag forces the overlay window to persistently float above all other applications, making it consistently accessible without being covered.

Here’s an example code snippet:

const { BrowserWindow } = require('electron');

const win = new BrowserWindow({
  width: 800,
  height: 600,
  transparent: true,
  frame: false,
  alwaysOnTop: true,
  skipTaskbar: true,
  resizable: false,
  fullscreen: false,
  webPreferences: {
    nodeIntegration: true,
    contextIsolation: false,
  }
});
win.loadURL('file://' + __dirname + '/index.html');

Backend Communication

The overlay captures clipboard data, screenshots, or selected text and sends this information to an AI backend (e.g., OpenAI) via WebSockets or HTTP requests. This backend quickly processes and returns useful suggestions or solutions.

Screen Capture and OCR

Advanced implementations use native modules (like node-ffi, robotjs) to capture specific screen areas and run OCR (

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