Cluely: An 'honest' user's review

so I subscribed to yet another AI tool and tried it for a month. No, I did not cheat on interviews with it lol.

I was pretty curious to see what Cluely could actually do beyond the marketing glam. If you are curious, no, I did not use it to cheat on interviews. I won’t get into the ethics/morality of this - but I think they did pretty well going with this value proposition. It brought them quite a lot of success! (A cool $15M check from a16z)

What caught my attention was their meeting notes/assistant functionality, so I decided to give it a shot. Put in my credit card and subscribed to yet another $20 AI tool.

(I might need help at this point.)

The good Stuff

The first few days were really good - like with any relationship, oops, I mean tool. I was genuinely impressed, an AI assistant feeding you information in real time while on calls is pretty neat. There was no need for AI note takers to join the call. Although right now most meeting tools like Zoom and Meet have in built AI note taking ability.

It takes some manual effort but if you wanted you can feed in context and documents prior to the call to have it surface the right details just in time.

Apart from note taking it was good to have an assistant that had direct access to my screen, I no longer had to copy paste screenshots in Chatgpt or Claude. It solved a point of friction.

The not so good stuff

After the short-lived honeymoon period, however, I started questioning the value proposition. I had just started using Perplexity’s new AI browser - Comet. A lot of my use cases for Cluely just disappeared. Using comet I could directly ask it to summarize a webpage or proofread my writing. Friction? Solved.

A bigger realizeation I had was that I rarely ever went back to my meeting notes. Most of the time, the important stuff gets added to my to-do list immediately, and if I didn’t add it maybe it wasn’t that important after all.

I won’t lie, having real time support during calls was great, and I might actually miss it, but it's not a must-have for me right now.

Why I won’t continue subscribing

Cluely could be pretty useful if you are in sales and need an invisible wingman to feed you intel while on customer calls or if you are someone who takes meetings all day.

But at $20 per month, Cluely is competing in an increasingly crowded space. It’s a cool tool that works as advertised, however I just can’t justify another subscription for a marginal productivity boost. If they had a more flexible pay-per-use model, I’d probably reconsider.