Creative Hackers: How AI is collapsing credentials and breaking all of the rules

There's a scene in the film Booksmart where Molly, the school-obsessed overachiever who dresses and acts like she's forty, discovers through an awkward bathroom encounter that her classmates—the ones she wrote off as slackers—are heading to Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown after graduation. Even the kid who failed seventh grade twice landed a six-figure engineering job at Google straight out of high school.

"This isn't possible," Molly protests. "You guys don't even care about school."

Her Yale-bound classmate's response cuts to the heart of everything: "No, we just don't only care about school."

This moment perfectly captures what I call the Creative Hacker mindset. As we enter the AI era, the old playbook of working harder isn't just outdated—it's counterproductive. Success now belongs to those who work smarter, think differently, and refuse to be constrained by traditional ways of building.

The Great Credential Collapse

For the first time in 45 years, people with bachelor's degrees or higher have unemployment rates above the national average. The time-honored formula— study hard, get good grades, graduate with honors—is failing to deliver its promised outcomes.

This shift explains why Cluely's provocative "cheat on everything" motto has struck such a nerve, particularly in Silicon Valley. The phrase makes traditionalists uncomfortable because it challenges their fundamental assumptions about merit and success.

Whether we like it or not, an entire generation is already "cheating" on essays and exams using ChatGPT and similar tools. We're witnessing venture-scale businesses built by teams without classically trained engineers—just builders with sharp product intuition and access to democratized tools that let anyone create based on instinct rather than credentials. The “you can just do things” mantra of Silicon Valley is producing a whole new way of learning and building that needs no college degree or blessing from a top tier VC.

If we look specifically at the world’s top technical talent, there are plenty of Creative Hackers who take “cheating” one step further by copying popular startups and immediately open-sourcing their version for free to prove a point.

Breaking the Sacred Rules

Every sacred rule of education and startups are not only being questioned publicly, but disproven through outliers embracing this new “you can just do things” mentality.

Take Y Combinator's long-standing bias against solo founders. For years, they actively discouraged single-person teams, and even their rare solo founder exceptions typically found co-founders soon after acceptance.

When Dropbox's Drew Houston applied to YC in Winter 2007, he had just two weeks to find a co-founder.

Here’s his initial application:

Today, we're seeing solo-founded, six-month-old companies sell for $80 million in cash. Critics might argue these founders are selling too early or could achieve more with co-founders, but that misses the point entirely. Creative Hackers don't optimize for external validation—they build on their own terms and can achieve generational wealth in the process.

The Replit Revolution

Replit exemplifies Creative Hacking at scale. For years, many traditional VCs didn’t really understand the product, the value of its community, and how they would monetize without a traditional sales team. The team remained committed to shipping exceptional products rather than compromising product in favor of an old-school way of building a company: hire a large sales team, add new features based on large enterprise customers, and ultimately slow shipping velocity as tensions between engineering and sales are inevitable.

Just six months ago and after eight years of building, Replit hit $10 million ARR. A great milestone for any company, especially one that has emphasized keeping the product accessible and affordable for all types of builders globally.

But here's where the story gets interesting: with an already addicted base of engineers using the product daily and an explosive ecosystem of vibe coders discovering Replit for the first time, Replit grew from $10M to $100M ARR in just six months. A growth rate that defies the old-school “triple, triple, double, double, double”

By staying committed to the product experience and its global community, Replit has been able to achieve both “vibe coding” revenue and land large enterprise customers like Anthropic, Coinbase, Hubspot, Zillow, and other big names.

Creative Hacking applies to distribution, not just building products

When I first explored Creative Hackers in 2019, I focused primarily on no-code builders and individuals who build in public while collaborating with like-minded peers. They looked more like builders on Product Hunt, indie hackers, even Stay at Home Valley, the social network I built in Figma could be considered a way of creatively hacking a new way for designers to collaborate in a laidback, engaging way.

These types of Creative Hackers often faced criticism for being "stunt-driven" and hype-driven and disagreeable when given traditional advice. When you reference check them, you’ll get mixed reviews. They don’t study traditional playbooks. They don’t want to network with traditional VCs. They’re truly unconventional, sometimes even to a fault.

Creative Hackers don't set out to build marginally better versions of existing products. They create things that are difficult to understand because they're living in the future. This approach often offends classically trained tech professionals who value credentials, logos on their resume, and tend to value a more linear career path.

Today, I think more holistically about Creative Hacking because building a product is only half the equation—distribution matters equally, if not more. A consistent Substack writer who masterfully leverages social media and native community features is just as much a Creative Hacker as an open-source contributor.

In the current social media recession, creatively hacking your way to better distribution is as crucial as creatively building your product itself. TikTok engagement dropped from 5.69% to 2.63% this year and Facebook interactions are down 47% YOY.

This is why Tomato Girl Summer is taking over Instagram and outperforming AI slop and a digital camera is the most popular accessory this summer. Except for maybe the Labubu if you’re lucky enough to find one.

Cluely recently proved distribution is not limited to cool consumer brands, software companies can leverage the same marketing psychology to break through the noise and convert curiosity into meaningful revenue.

The Open Source Paradox

Here's the beautiful irony of the Creative Hacker era: good ideas will be copied and talented engineers who embrace open-source will build copycats and offer them to the broader community for free. This doesn’t mean the products are enterprise-grade products with the correct security features and reporting to make them a viable solution for more established companies. But for the hobbyist builder, anyone can creatively hack their way to a decent product using free open-source projects.

Another thing you’ll find with more contrarian technical creative hackers is they are not guarded or precious with their work. You won’t find their personal site or portfolio password protected, sharing freely online is a sign of confidence. The true Creative Hackers welcome criticism and aren’t afraid to get in fights on the internet over their technical philosophies and ways of doing things.

To become a Creative Hacker you need to get comfortable with freely sharing your work and developing a thick skin when it comes to online haters.

The Future Belongs to the Unconventional

The Creative Hacker movement represents more than a trend—it's a fundamental shift in how value gets created and recognized. As AI continues to democratize technical capabilities, success will increasingly belong to those who can think creatively, move quickly, and ignore conventional wisdom.

The question isn't whether you'll adapt to this new reality, but whether you'll embrace it before your competition does. The future belongs to those who, like Molly's classmates, understand that caring about more than just the traditional path is far more interesting than playing by the rules.

I would love to hear from Creative Hackers in Silicon Valley and find even more examples for future posts, please reach out and say hi! Also, follow me on X @briannekimmel