I hadn’t heard much about Cluely until recently. It wasn’t on my usual social feeds, but I caught a mention on the Quick Coffee podcast. Then I watched Hiten Shah’s video, and honestly? It got me thinking about where product building is heading.

Here’s what struck me about Cluely: they’re controversial by design. The founders don’t put up with outrage—they go out of their way to cause it. Their approach seems brutally simple: any publicity is good publicity.

Hiten Shah asks a question that’s been stuck in my head: Would you build a perfect product no one notices, or a controversial product everyone talks about?

It’s the car crash phenomenon we all know from social media. People can’t look away. What’s fascinating is how Cluely turns that attention into a growth engine, no matter how negative the reaction.

But something deeper is happening here.

The AI leveling problem

Hiten’s video made me realize we’re facing a fundamental shift. As AI tools become universally available, they’re leveling the playing field in ways that make me uncomfortable.

Think about it: both you and your competitors will soon be generating high-quality documents and designs using the same AI assistants. Your competitors can prompt the same models, generate similar features, and copy your functionality in weeks, if not quicker.

When everyone has access to the same powerful tools, what sets you apart?

The insight problem that frustrates me

Here’s what I’ve learned: you need insights that go deeper than what AI can surface. AI will summarize and analyze all day long, but your unique value comes from understanding people and markets on a more human level.

Hardik Pandya nailed this in his piece on AI’s limits. He points out that you need to hang out where strategic context lives—hallway conversations, service tickets, community forums. AI summarizes documents fine, but those “hard judgment calls” live in messy social signals that require human interpretation.

What I’m talking about is understanding:

  • The jobs customers are really hiring your product to do (not what they say in interviews)
  • Hidden motivations that drive behavior
  • The unspoken constraints and trade-offs that shape every decision

But here’s the thing that frustrates me about strategy discussions: insights alone don’t create value. They are inputs.

You need creative execution

This is where creativity becomes the engine of value. It’s the force that transforms inert understanding into something tangible.

If insight is about seeing the truth, creativity is about acting on it in a way no one else has. It’s less a flash of genius and more the discipline of connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.

While AI can optimize a known path to perfection, creativity defines a new path altogether. It’s the vision for why something must exist and what it should become, long before the first line of code is written.

This is why creative strategy isn’t an optimization problem. It’s about deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

It’s having the courage to ask, “What is everyone else doing, and how can we approach it differently?”—not for the sake of being contrarian, but to find a novel solution where others see a conventional path.

In a world where AI levels the playing field, your competitive advantage won’t come from better tools. It’ll come from better thinking.

Where I think Hiten might be missing something

And where I might not agree with his take.

If the future is about distribution and cultural relevance, you need insight and creativity to matter. Otherwise, you’ll be lost in the noise.

Something that frustrates me about the attention economy: attention doesn’t build trust.

Trust is the scarce resource, not attention.

Getting noticed and getting trusted are different games. Trust is harder to earn and way more important for the long haul.

Cluely might win the attention game now, but I wonder about their staying power. When everyone’s fighting for eyeballs, the companies that build genuine trust through consistent value delivery will be the ones left standing.

This tension matters for how we think about strategy.

Where I think we’re headed

While your competitors are prompting AI for feature ideas, you’re uncovering jobs that customers can’t even articulate. While they’re optimizing for viral moments, you’re designing experiences that consistently deliver on promises. While they’re copying best practices, you’re connecting insights from different domains to create genuine value.

The strategic context that matters won’t be found in the documents AI can summarize. It’s in the messy, unstructured signals that require human judgment.

Here’s what I think our edge looks like as AI democratizes everything else:

  • Seeing what others miss in those messy signals
  • Understanding hidden motivations better than anyone else
  • Having the creativity to act on insights in unexpected ways

That last point matters more than people realize. Having the creativity to act on insights means connecting dots others don’t see. Like how Figma connected real-time collaboration (from Google Docs) to design tools. Or taking a behavioral insight from one domain and applying it somewhere unexpected.

That’s where the competitive advantage lives.