Interviews with Cluely's Roy Lee, Donald Boat, and other highly “agentic” young men, as agency becomes more valuable than technical skills in Silicon Valley
Tech's new generation and the end of thinking … Cluely and its co-founder Chungin “Roy” Lee were intensely, and intentionally, controversial.
Harper'sSam Kriss
Context & Ripple Effects
Cluely entered the AI-startup conversation through a deliberately provocative product pitch and Roy Lee's early fundraising story, including the company’s launch around an interview-cheating tool. That origin makes the current focus on its founder’s public persona consequential, not merely a founder profile.
The interviews further make Roy Lee’s willingness to court controversy and project decisiveness part of Cluely’s public identity, affecting how prospective customers, hires, and partners assess the company.
They elevate “agency” as an explicit status signal around this startup cohort, alongside technical ability rather than as a purely private hiring preference.
Second-order effects
AI startups competing for attention have an added incentive to pair product launches with forceful founder-led distribution, reinforcing the speed-first approach associated with Cluely.
For rivals, credibility, product quality, and governance become more important counter-signals when publicity and personal audacity can rapidly command attention.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, AI entrepreneurship may reward founders who combine technical execution with distribution and narrative control, shifting the definition of scarce startup talent.
The trade-off is a potentially wider gap between visibility and trust: companies that use controversy as a growth tool may face more scrutiny from buyers and partners as they seek larger contracts.
The trend: AI’s startup boom is making founder agency—speed, distribution, and willingness to act under uncertainty—a more central competitive asset alongside technical depth.
there is a brand of leftist brainrot where the writer finds the most attention seeking hacks with their calendars fully open and takes their incompetence or unseriousness as representative of entire industries. surely these idiots must mean industry itself is idiotic!
Incredible work here, per usual. I try to keep it pretty professional on X, but I feel impelled to say that the Roy Lee contingent in SF deserves nothing but scorn (and gonzo ethnography of the Sam Kriss variety, so we can keep tabs, and figure out how it all went wrong). These
“Until we build an all-powerful but distant God, the agency problem remains. AIs are not capable of directing themselves; most people aren't either.” Sam Kriss reports from San Francisco on the next generation of AI technologists. https://harpers.org/...
What kind of twisted world is it where the place I work publishes an essay about Donald Boat yet he still has me blocked on Twitter. Very messed up situation
sam kriss wrote about the cluely founder and adjacent sf tech scene people in harper's where donald boat makes a delightful supporting act appearance, but this was my favorite side bit from it. like clavicular, this hyper optimizer type of guy makes up like 10-20% of men now. [im…
“The future they seem to envisage is one in which people don't really do anything at all, except follow the instructions given to them by machines.” — harpers.org/archive/2026...
“As a child, he loved reading—Harry Potter, Percy Jackson—until he turned eight. 'My mom tried to put me on classical books and I couldn't understand, like, the bullshit Huckleberry, whatever fuck bullshit, and it made me bored.'” — harpers.org/archive/2026...
This article was truly hilarious/disturbing & also, ratified one strong approach to tech journalism, which is, “go talk to the craziest, most quotable lunatics you can find” harpers.org/archive/2026...
“In San Francisco the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.” —Sam Kriss harpers.org/archive/2026...
I miss SuperHappyDevHouse. I miss my local Python meetup. I miss a sense of possibility and wonder and art and just _fun_ at what we could do with computers. — When I look at what remains of that culture though, it's like reading Heart of Darkness now https://harpers.org/...
a friend of mine recently turned me on to this incredible article about the bleak state of the ai tech world and the robin hood-esque escapades of one guy on twitter and now i must share it with all of you because it's the best reporting i've read in a while — harpers.org/archi…
This made me rub my eyes at least every three sentences, thinking it must be satire or fiction. Unbelievable story, extremely believable writing. — harpers.org/archive/2026...