He Outsmarted Amazon. Columbia Kicked Him Out.
Roy Lee was suspended for developing an AI tool to ace coding interviews—now his company is raking in over $200k a month.
If you scroll through Roy Lee’s X feed, you’d probably assume things are going well for him. The former Columbia College sophomore’s app, which lets users harness the power of undetectable AI during those notoriously nitpicky coding interviews, is pulling in over $200,000 in monthly revenue with a 99 percent profit margin.
Some folks, including myself and other tech Twitter mainstays like @levelsio and @deedydas (if you know, you know), find this genuinely impressive. The mainstream media, however, hasn’t shared in the applause. They’ve described Lee’s innovation as aiding students in “cheating” their technical interviews, cherry-picking comments from LinkedIn that label his project as “morally unethical” and “corrupt.”
However, Interview Coder wasn’t born out of laziness or a desire to cut corners—it was Lee’s response to a broken, outdated interview process. For years, landing a job in tech has meant grinding LeetCode, a gamified system of solving algorithm problems that has little to do with actual software development. Lee saw how detached that was from real-world engineering and built something that empowered candidates to succeed on their own terms.
To demonstrate how effective Interview Coder was, Lee used the tool during an interview for Amazon’s internship program—and at the time, unbeknownst to Amazon, he even posted the recording to YouTube. They extended him an offer, which he ultimately declined. “I’m writing to tell you that I’m not taking the offer,” he replied back. “I have no intention and have never had any intention of spending the summer interning at Amazon.”
The video was taken down from YouTube “due to a copyright claim by Amazon.com, Inc.,” but Sundial is republishing it in full.
Amazon then resorted to the adult equivalent of calling the principal by filing a “Behavioral Conduct Reporting Form” with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention (CSSI). They politely underscored the “high caliber” of students they expect Columbia to produce before complaining that Lee had “blatantly and irreverently cheated.”
“We trust in Columbia to take proper action with regards to this student, and we hope to continue this long-standing partnership,” Amazon wrote.
Columbia’s administrators obeyed, translating “proper action” into disciplinary notices and an initial virtual hearing on February 17—which, in true Roy Lee fashion, he secretly recorded and posted a clip of on X. It was a classic “emperor has no clothes” moment, and the admins, unsurprisingly, were not amused.
After the hearing, CSSI informed him that he was guilty of “academic dishonesty” and placed him on probation. To justify disciplinary action, Columbia’s administrators had to perform some impressive policy gymnastics. Their argument was that Lee violated University policy because, theoretically, the tool—even though it was explicitly designed and marketed for tech interviews—could be misused to cheat on Columbia exams if they were ever conducted via one-on-one Zoom sessions. Quite the Grand Canyon-sized leap, if you ask me.
In response to Lee posting a clip from the February 17 hearing as well as the letter CSSI sent him, the “Student Conduct team” charged him for “publishing unauthorized documents regarding your Dean’s Discipline Hearing” and for posting a “photo of yourself with the Columbia University staff members on your social media without authorization” (the video blurred the faces of the staff members).
They scheduled another hearing for March 11—in person this time, presumably to stop Lee from recording again. Not one to be outmaneuvered, he bought a pair of Meta Ray-Bans specifically for recording, prompting the admins to respond with yet another formal letter.
Fearing the light of public scrutiny, CSSI canceled the hearing entirely. Lee’s spoken testimony wouldn’t be necessary. They encouraged him to submit a written statement instead, to which he replied:
The next move was predictable: Administrators decided Lee no longer had a place at Columbia.
“Due to the nature of the violation(s), you are suspended from Columbia College effective immediately and eligible to return after May 20, 2026,” they wrote to him.
Lee could have avoided the entire fiasco by simply dropping out months earlier. Instead, he left his fate up to X through a poll, long before his full viral breakout. After polling 40 loyal followers, a slim majority urged him to “rage bait admin” and go for expulsion.
How could someone face the possibility of expulsion with such nonchalance? The truth is that this wasn’t Lee’s first run-in with administrative problems.
When Lee was a senior in high school, things were going well in a more traditional sense: He had just gotten accepted to Harvard, and given that his mom ran an admissions consulting business, this decision was especially meaningful.
Lee’s path took a turn for the worse during a high school volunteering trip. While he was visiting a city with a strict curfew for minors, he and a group of classmates went to another hotel after the curfew to meet up with friends. When hotel staff discovered they weren’t registered guests, they called the police. The incident led to Roy’s arrest and suspension from school. Soon after, Harvard rescinded his admission offer.
“I thought it was pretty bullshit,” Lee told Sundial. “But I mean, I just saw it coming.” He described the moment as surreal and devastating: “This was the big thing I’d been working for my whole life, just ripped away.”
After lots of familial shouting matches, Lee found himself living at home, isolated. He spent a lonely year during the COVID lockdowns sharpening his coding skills through random projects, but it was still the darkest moment of his life.
“I almost certainly would have killed myself if [my family] weren’t around,” he said. He eventually enrolled in community college, grinding relentlessly until he secured a spot at another prestigious Ivy League school—Columbia.
Despite his misfortune, this period of Lee’s life fundamentally altered his perspective. He described the rescinded Harvard offer as “sort of like God calling me, telling me you’re not meant to just do the traditional college route.” He realized what truly mattered in life: family, personal connections, and meaningful experiences.
“The second I got the acceptance letter to Columbia, that was 99% of the value I could have gotten out of the school,” he said. The mere prestige of the Columbia name—and the instant platform it provided—was almost the only thing he actually needed. With that “Columbia” badge in hand, he could both claim smart‑kid credibility while also turning around and mocking the institution itself.
In terms of his actual education here, Lee sees little value. He bluntly critiqued the Columbia computer science department, stating that “there’s not a single class here that teaches you how to build things.” He lamented that “the professors are teaching a bunch of antiquated f*cking theory” instead of offering practical instruction in modern tech stacks.
What Lee really wanted wasn’t to sit in lecture halls—it was to wield the Columbia brand as a weapon: To show the world he could drop out, build something far bigger than any classroom, and wave that holy Ivy-League imprimatur around to make Interview Coder’s profit grow exponentially.
The typical Columbia student rubs the genie of their alma mater, hoping their degree will magically open doors to finance firms, big tech companies, law schools, or other established institutions. For many, their self-worth is fully invested in these institutions; their entire lives revolve around coloring within the lines. Often at the detriment of personal and familial relationships, they spend hours working on technicals, filling out applications, and yes, grinding LeetCode.
“Most people who are in Ivy Leagues have been structured throughout their whole life and excelled at the tasks they were told to do,” Lee said. “To be different here is to not do consulting.”
Risk, in this institutional context, is anything perceived as disobedient—holding unapproved ideologies, disrupting traditional workflows, or publicly questioning authority. Such managerial control echoes the bureaucratic and ideological conformity of the modern industrial era marked by authoritarianism and passive mass compliance.
Roy represents a new kind of social organization enabled by the digital age. In a world where someone can “vibe code” an app generating $200,000 in monthly revenue and distribute their product globally without institutional permission, power will shift—it moves away from established institutions and towards independent builders and sovereign individuals.
Most Columbia students view dropping out and starting a company as risky because it involves standing alone, being fully accountable, and steering one's destiny without institutional guidance.
But, as Lee put it, “Risky things are often not as risky as they seem. The consequences are never that bad. I can always just get back up on my feet.”
Yet, many students overlook the broader existential risk: Bureaucratic institutions getting displaced by small, agile teams of independent, eccentric builders. Too many students are vying for spots aboard the HMS Institutional Prestige without realizing that a small, resourceful team could 3D-print a drone that could sink the whole ship.
Today, AI is commoditizing knowledge work—work that requires the very skills educational institutions like Columbia have traditionally drilled into their students. “All the knowledge work we’ve placed so much importance on today is going to be obsolete. Almost all our cognitive load and thinking will be offloaded to AI,” Lee said.
So to those who claim Lee’s tool is used for “cheating,” consider that the rules of the game are rapidly and irreversibly changing. “ChatGPT is always going to be at our side, just like our phones and Google, or calculators in our back pocket,” Lee said. “You need to be out there building things. The world is just changing really, really fast.”
And for those wary of spending their futures tethered to a chatbot, Lee is already coming up with solutions. He’s currently developing Pike, a user interface designed for the multimodal future of AI. “It’s inevitable that LLMs [Large Language Models] will support more input forms than text,” he explained, “and Pike is the optimal UX [User Experience] for this future.”
And to Columbia students who find tools like Interview Coder morally suspect—remember, “Everything’s Computer!” It might just be time to abandon ship and start building.
Mr. Chimicles is a senior at Columbia College studying history and computer science. He is an editor-at-large at Sundial.
It's a fun story and all, but the theory that we can offload the task of "knowing things" to LLMs is as silly as the theory that the Google search made knowledge obsolete 30 years ago.