switched from cluely to a desktop overlay after hackerrank flagged me on a real assessment, the architecture difference is the whole story
i did a hackerrank assessment tuesday afternoon for a fintech role and got auto rejected by wednesday morning. recruiter had been responsive all week, replying within an hour, then radio silence after i submitted. i thought she was busy. nope, i had been auto rejected before a human ever saw my code. only figured it out bc the rejection report had a phrase at the bottom: "application activity detected during assessment." that single line cost me the role.
so i had been running cluely for that one. higher tier with the stealth add on. paying the premium bc i thought premium meant actually undetectable. nope. ate the loss, lost the role, spent thursday trying to figure out what the report had even said.
"application activity detected" is the new 2026 hackerrank flag for any window that the OS treats as a separate focusable app. cluely runs as a chromium overlay, so it IS a separate focusable app. every time you click into it during the assessment, the assessment tab loses focus, hackerrank logs the focus loss, the report shows "application activity detected" at the top, and the company auto rejects on the report before a human reviews the code. is not even some clever AI detection. just os level focus tracking.
someone in my discord study group had been bugging me about a different tool for weeks. native macos overlay, mouse pass through, hidden from cmd tab, excluded from screen capture. id ignored him bc i had already paid for cluely + stealth tier and didnt want to eat another sub. now i ate it anyway. downloaded the new thing thursday night, ran the hackerrank practice with proctoring fully on, did 4 problems back to back. report came back clean every single time. ran it again w everything maxed including the proctor.io webcam tier. still clean. zero confirmed detections in any of my runs.
the only architectural difference that matters is that the native overlay never asks for focus. you read the answer through it without clicking, the assessment tab never registers a focus jump, the proctoring report has nothing to flag. it is also way cheaper than what i was paying for cluely + stealth combined. ill drop the actual numbers in a comment bc the sub mods get cranky about price talk in the OP.
did my second assessment with the new tool last week, different company, same role type, finished both problems clean, recruiter set up the next round on monday. so the architecture switch directly saved the loop for me. would not have known any of this if i hadnt actually scrolled to the bottom of the rejection report.
anyone else here moved off a chromium based helper to a native overlay this year? curious what your practice report came back with and which tool you landed on.