r/Cluely

senior backend, 7 yoe, leaving a series c for stripe. base + sign + equity lands around 310k y1. used cluely throughout, will note where it helped and where it didn't. stripe is not a leetcode loop, anyone walking in with a neetcode 150 mindset is going to get cooked.

recruiter screen, 30 min. nothing here. comp expectations, why stripe, resume walkthrough. cluely was open and surfaced nothing useful, this round is just vibes.

phone screen, 45 min, one practical coding question. they handed me a broken function that was supposed to retry an http request with backoff and asked me to fix it and extend it for idempotency keys. not a leetcode pattern. cluely doesn't pattern-match real-world api code the way it does graph problems. what it did was keep an idempotency cheat sheet visible that I had loaded the night before, so when the interviewer pushed on collision handling I had a structure to fall back on.

onsite 1, integration round, 90 min. this is the round most people fail without realizing it's the one. they hand you a partial codebase and ask you to build a feature end to end. mine was a webhook handler that needed to verify signatures, parse the payload, dedupe events, and write to a queue. the interviewer reads your code as you write it and asks why. cluely surfaced a high-level outline (verify, dedupe, persist, ack) but the code was me. the friction point was the dedupe strategy, the interviewer pushed on what happens if the worker dies mid-process, cluely had nothing for that, that was 10 minutes of me reasoning out loud.

onsite 2, system design, 60 min. design a payment retry system with tenant isolation. cluely earned its keep here. the consistency vs availability framing, the queue-vs-cron tradeoff, the noisy neighbor pattern all surfaced cleanly. the interviewer dug hardest on failure modes (what if the upstream bank is flaky for 6 hours), which is the kind of follow up cluely doesn't help with because it's company-specific reasoning.

onsite 3, bug bash. 60 min, broken go service, find and fix as many bugs as you can while talking through your reasoning. they care more about how you triage than how many you fix. cluely was inert here. the round is you reading code, forming hypotheses, testing them. the only thing it did was keep a running list of bugs I had already chased so when the interviewer asked me to summarize at the wrap-up I wasn't scrambling.

onsite 4, behavioral. stripe operating principles. cluely's STAR structure was solid, kept stories to 2 to 3 minutes, flagged when I started drifting on the conflict one. the stories themselves I had prepped over 2 weeks. you can't fake this round with a tool, but cluely keeps you from rambling.

onsite 5, hiring manager. mostly conversation. why stripe, what do you want to build. cluely was off for this one, this round is just being a person.

offer call 4 days later. starts in 3 weeks.

if you're prepping stripe, the integration round is the one to optimize for. neetcode won't save you. read their api docs cover to cover, build something small that hits a real third-party api, and get comfortable writing code while someone watches. cluely helps on system design and behavioral, helps marginally on integration (outline only), and is inert on bug bash. ama if useful.

context. senior backend, distributed systems heavy, currently at an ai company. faang and ai labs both, some quant adjacent.

leetcode, neetcode 150 I do 30 to 40 company-tagged problems on leetcode premium for the specific company and watch neetcode youtube videos which have the cleanest pattern explainer on the internet, watch the ones for your weakest patterns twice.

system design. hellointerview is the most useful single resource for this right now. the round structure they teach (functional reqs, non-functional, api, schema, deep dive) maps to what faang and the better unicorns are running. if you only have time for one thing, this is it. backup, system design interview vol 1 and 2 by alex xu for the case studies. for systems depth, designing data-intensive applications by kleppmann

mocking. interviewing.io is worth the money if you can afford it. real engineers, real feedback, anonymous so failures don't haunt you. pramp is fine but the variance is high because you're matched with another candidate. a senior friend at a target company is the best mock

behavioral. this is where most people underprep. I write 8 to 10 stories tagged by theme (conflict, leadership, ownership, ambiguity, dive deep, failure, pivot, scope) and rehearse them out loud. for STAR structure I give the rough story to claude and ask it to format it into a 2-minute star, then I rewrite it in my own voice. if you submit a chatgpt-formatted answer in a real interview it sounds like a chatgpt-formatted answer.

company specific. for every loop I build a doc with the company's recent eng blog posts (every one from the last 12 months for the team I'm interviewing into), their public papers if they have any, glassdoor and 1point3acres reports (1point3acres is better for ml and faang loops, translate works fine), and the team's tech radar if I can find it. 2 to 4 hours per loop and it pays for itself in system design alone.

live tool. cluely.com on every live round. strong on system design and behavioral, decent on coding when the question is a known pattern, basically inert on integration rounds, debugging rounds, and anything where the interviewer is watching you read code in real time. don't expect it to think for you, expect it to keep your scaffolding visible so you don't blank. I prime it round by round with the company doc loaded plus the round framework. 30 min setup per loop, more if it's a non-faang format.

ama. one thing I'd say, no stack saves you if you can't communicate. The bottleneck on senior loops is almost never the algorithm.

I update cluley once evey two days, but still not as good as the first time i installed it. Why?

Shouldn’t by time stuff gets better? Also is there a way to make it back? They now updated it so you can add more files, but its slower now….

And not as fast as it used to be.

The previous model was limited but faster, smarter even, now alot of times it answer previous questions from the conversion and by the time the answer is displayed it has been already passed too much time…

I had to conduct a technical interview with a candidate as a senior developer. Strong resume, mostly startups, looked legit on paper.

I had a ton of work that week but since I like the hiring manager I accepted to do the interview in between a crucial release despite my workload. I've been laid off from a previous company. I know how hard it is to find a job, how hard it is to apply constantly and get rejected. I wanted him to pass and get hired.

For the algorithm question I usually ask a medium and watch how they approach it, don't really care if they make a ton of mistakes, put a ton of logs etc.. Don't expect them to remember all the details, they can look stuff up. If they finish in any form it's a pass. If they show promise but don't finish, still a pass. I help them throughout the interview with debugging, not the puzzling "should there be an if there ???" thing but actually helping them like a colleague.

Why do I still ask an algo question even though I hate it myself. Because I've seen people in the past who said they could code but really couldn't write 2 lines of code.

Anyways we talk about tech stuff, he answers questions in a way I didn't expect but it's fine, we all get exposed to different things. I brush it off then we get into the algorithm question..

This guy writes clean code, talks through his approach, hits a wall around minute 15, pauses for a beat, then keeps going with a slightly different framing than what he started with. Caught it because at one point he said "actually wait, let me try the two-pointer way" and his hand was already typing the two-pointer before the words came out. Small tell but I knew. He had something running, probably cluely or interview coder.

Here's the thing though. I didn't care. He still wrote the code, still debugged it himself, still walked me through edge cases when I pushed on them, still answered the follow-up on complexity without missing a beat. The tool gave him a nudge when he froze. So what. My engineers have copilot open all day. Our PMs draft specs with chatgpt. We screen resumes with AI. We score take-homes with AI. The interview being the one room where AI is forbidden makes no sense.

I passed him. Hiring manager passed him too. He starts in two weeks.

Anyways, use the tools, just use them well. The candidates who get caught are the ones who use them badly, eyes on a second screen, copying chatgpt word for word. The ones who use them well still write their own code, still think out loud, still handle the follow-ups. That's a real engineer. That's the same engineer you'd be on day 1 with copilot open at your desk.

Hi. Does anyone know the link to cluely's official discord server? The one on their site redirects to an invalid link.

Thanks.

opencluely unfortunately only works for gemini, but it works... will it work on sys design scenario coding?

Quick context. Senior SWE, two job switches in 2025, first into a series C with a coding-heavy loop (4 algo rounds and a take-home), second into a forward-deployed engineer role at an AI company where the loop was 1 algo, an ML system design, a behavioral, and a final with a non-technical exec. Used Interview Coder for the first cycle and Cluely for the second.

live coding: IC by far the best here, latency is tighter and prompts are tuned for understanding the problem and state of the code and what the user should do next, which allows you to be more time efficient. Cluely handles coding rounds fine and you wouldn't notice on smaller & easier problems, but on a hard graph problem you see a difference in speed and precision.

system design & ML design: IC struggles here, the prompts feel like coding-overlay logic stretched into a domain it wasn't built for and you get component suggestions without the tradeoff framing the interviewer is actually asking for. Cluely pattern-matches better, surfacing the consistency vs availability follow ups and the scale tradeoffs an interviewer expects you to walk through. My ML system design round (recsys, latency budget, eval loop) was noticeably stronger with Cluely.

behavioral & hiring manager rounds: to be expected but IC is really not that good here. Cluely's prompts were way better, STAR-shaped structure and knew when I started to go off topic, and gave me tips to get back on the subject. (ps. I share some stories with claude to format them to a STAR shaped structure and then finish the details with cluely, or else cluely doesn't work as well)

non-interview live calls: IC isn't built for this, so Cluely is the choice here, for example in my second week at my new job when the founder put me on a client scoping, I could use cluely as an overlay and it helped me with surfacing follow up questions and details about the client that I could refer to in the conversation, then it also made notes of the recording I could send our founder.

cold open & pricing: cold-open latency is roughly the same on both, IC slightly faster on a coding open because it has less context to load, Cluely a minute or two slower on open-ended calls. Pricing, Interview Coder is more expensive but way more useful in pure technical interviews, Cluely is less expensive and focuses more on being an all-around cheating overlay.

overall: if your loop is 100% coding (FAANG backend, quant dev, leetcode hards every round), IC is your go to. if your loop has anything else in it (system design, ML design, behavioral, case round, exec final, sales pitch), Cluely is the better choice. And if you don't know your loop yet, Cluely is the safer pick.

couldn't stop texting me about it on the way home from the round. cluely clutched up during the partner case on the quantitative part, he said he blanked twice and the frame kept him moving. signed this morning, base lands around 115k which is standard consultant comp out of undergrad.

so proud of my boy lol. gonna try it for my own loop next month.

Just tried to reinstall mobile version, but it is no longer in the app store. I still have it installed locally but it logged me out, and pressing login asks me to download desktop version…

I’m having trouble logging into Cluly using Apple login and wondering if anyone else has faced this.

I use Apple’s Private Relay feature, so my real email isn’t shared. I tried logging in with the relay email as well, but it doesn’t seem to forward anything to my actual inbox.

I’ve already reached out to the Cluly support team but haven’t received a response yet. The frustrating part is that I also have a premium subscription tied to this account.

Has anyone experienced this issue or found a workaround? Any help would be appreciated.