Accusations of Plagiarism Fly as Interview Tool Cheating Daddy Takes Aim at Pickles Glass App

A new product has arrived in the world of cheating technology: the startup Pickle has introduced an application called Glass. This project aims to accomplish the same tasks as Cluely and Roy Lee’s Interview Coder: it discreetly provides hints and correct answers to users during remote coding interviews, allowing them to navigate algorithmic assessments without making mistakes.

Soon after, Soham Bharambe accused Glass of plagiarism. He claims that the code for his project, Cheating Daddy—another clone of Cluely—was copied in violation of licensing agreements.

There is no standard entry barrier in software development. No regulatory body establishes requirements or profession standards under a unified certification; often, candidates are not even required to have relevant education. Formally, even a self-taught individual can become a programmer. This complicates hiring, as employers need to find a way to sift through hundreds of candidates.

One solution to this problem is algorithmic interviews, where applicants are asked to tackle simple programming tasks. As a result, both seasoned and junior professionals must repeatedly go through numerous screening stages, honing their ability to solve these often disjointed problems that have little connection to their actual work.

Despite their advantages for employers—such as scalability by processing hundreds of applicants for a position, ease of organization, and clear comparison criteria—algorithmic interviews have gained a notorious reputation among job seekers. Year after year, software developers criticize these algorithm-focused interviews (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). Yet, no clearly superior alternative has emerged.

Moreover, the situation has worsened over time. A few years of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic normalized the remote execution of certain interview stages, including coding challenges. Some candidates resort to cheating.

Methods of dishonesty have varied widely: impersonation, including the use of deepfakes, hints delivered through earpieces, and furtive glances at other screens or tabs. Some North Korean programmers have gone so far as to secretly work for U.S. companies in violation of sanctions to earn hard currency. Media outlets even circulated half-serious methods for identifying North Koreans by asking candidates how fat Kim Jong Un is.

With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), automated cheating was only a matter of time. The first such tool was developed by Chungin (also known as Roy) Lee and his business partner Neil Shanmugam. Interview Coder is a user-transparent and screen-capture-invisible wrapper for requests to ChatGPT during video calls.

During interviews, deceitful candidates can trigger the tool to take a screenshot of the task conditions while the LLM generates a response with the necessary reasoning, which the interviewee then presents on-screen. Since the Interview Coder window isn’t captured when screen sharing and is positioned where the candidate’s eyes should be directed, the interviewer remains oblivious.

At the end of 2024, Lee tested the invention for securing internships at several major firms and on January 30, 2025, boldly revealed his deceitful actions. Roy aimed for a viral effect to draw attention to the product; however, the outcome was far more negative than Chungin anticipated: he lost all internship offers and was expelled from Columbia University.

By that point, Lee had little interest in obtaining a degree. He founded the startup Cluely, which sought to facilitate cheating in all areas—not just in programming interviews. Roy secured investment, featured in a startup advertisement, and began recruiting interns. The Cluely website launched, with clients for Windows and macOS rolled out.

It’s worth noting that Cluely is not without its imitators. One such imitator was introduced on July 3 by Daniel Pak, the founder of the startup Pickle.

Pak’s biography closely mirrors Roy Lee’s journey. Both are young, ambitious ethnic Koreans from the U.S.; both have American names that replace their Korean birth names (Pak’s Korean name is 채근, Chae-geun). The difference lies in the fact that Daniel dropped out not from an Ivy League institution— the standard of prestige in American higher education—but from Kyung Hee University’s medical school in South Korea.

In South Korea, Confucian values still hold significant sway, and performing well on exams and getting into a good university play a crucial role in a person’s future. While Kyung Hee University is not among the top-tier SKY (Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei), it is in the top ten. Admission to medical programs at some South Korean institutions has recently seen competition as high as 661 applicants per slot. Like Lee, Pak possesses commendable abilities.

However, he could not handle the «neurophysiological burdens» of constant video calls and dropped out at the age of 22. By that time, he had already gained experience creating a digital marketplace for organic products, Kumefood, which he built with the support of his university’s business accelerator. After leaving university, Pak spent three years seeking co-founders and a development team. He co-founded a new company, Pickle, in July 2024, eventually securing a spot in the winter 2025 round of the renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator.

Importantly, Pickle is not attempting to replicate Cluely directly. The YC Winter 2025 grad from San Francisco is focused on creating a user’s digital avatar that replaces webcam video in real-time (often advertised with 0.3-second latency). This neural network-generated avatar mimics lip movements realistically and maintains a professional appearance, while the actual person can be dressed casually, walking outside, lounging on a couch, or relaxing on a beach.

However, on July 3, Daniel announced the creation of his own Cluely clone in an oddly phrased tweet claiming that Pickle had developed and released the latest version of Cluely called Glass with open-source code in just four days. He asserted that Glass is a similarly smart assistant with enhanced responses and design but entirely free of charge.

The emphasis on its free nature is notable. Cluely relies on a subscription model for monetization, whereas Glass simply requires users to provide their own OpenAI API key. Interestingly, the early versions of Interview Coder, Roy Lee’s initial cheating tool, also declined any attempts to monetize and asked users to find their own API key independently. This can be observed in the early versions of the project’s landing page. Subsequently, both Interview Coder and Cluely transitioned to a fixed subscription price of $20–25 per month, and the option to work with one’s own key disappeared.

Daniel commented that it seems strange to trust proprietary software like Cluely with screen recording and microphone audio streams, while the source code for Glass is open and accessible in the repository. (Apparently, he overlooked the fact that screenshots and audio are being routed to proprietary APIs.)

A few hours later, Glass was accused of plagiarism by Soham Bharambe, the developer behind Cheating Daddy—another clone of Interview Coder and Cluely but with open-source code.

Cheating Daddy was developed by Soham Bharambe, written about a month earlier in roughly a week’s time, with its first commits dating back to May 31. In the project’s Discord server, Soham explains that after the first week of active development, he focused mainly on minor improvements due to personal circumstances and illness.

The project is licensed under GPL version 3, meaning all derivative works must be distributed under the same license. The code is available in the repository, and there is a dedicated website for the project.

Cheating Daddy also asks users to find their own API key, but this product requires a feed from the Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Live model. However, it may also be possible to adapt the tool to work with a local model.

Soham’s main accusation is that Pickle did not fork Cheating Daddy to create Glass, but rather copied certain fragments of it, licensed the entire code under Apache 2.0, and claimed to have developed a new product from scratch in four days. As Soham suggested, this could create a means to later legally convert the project into proprietary software and close the code. He showed examples of the copied code.

Even comments within the code were copied.

Soham also noted that the use of the same versions of libraries he chose for his project indicated copying; it is unlikely that they matched by coincidence.

In the tweet thread, Pak emerged to assert that this was Pickle’s first open-source project, and that’s the reason for this situation. There were no hints of apology in Daniel’s tweet.

The situation took an even more interesting turn regarding how it was resolved. Initially, the LICENSE file specified Apache 2.0 licensing, which was later changed to GPL version 3. Subsequently, the authors performed a force-push—rewriting the main branch to make it appear as if the correct license had always been there. The commit concerning the license adjustment remained isolated and will not be visible in the project’s license history.

In the end, Pak published a lengthy apology to Soham Bharambe and the entire open-source community. In his message, Daniel listed seven components that the Pickle team built from scratch: various UI elements, Firebase onboarding for users unfamiliar with programming, a workflow for the LLM, and temporary free API keys. Important application features were copied from Cheating Daddy, such as the screen-capture-invisible UI and the system audio capture.

These components could be critical for similar applications. In any case, in early May, Roy Lee announced a $15,000 reward for anyone who could write a native audio capture driver for macOS, enabling the Cluely application on Electron to function without third-party software.

Soham accepted the apology. It appears that the conflict has now been resolved. Presently, his thoughts are likely focused on his job prospects, particularly in light of the attention his namesake from India, Soham Parekh, has received for particularly egregious cheating with multiple remote hires.