"Every transition in my day is a reset -- a chance to think differently." -- Qi

This is Part 2 of our interview with Qi -- a cognitive science researcher and founder exploring how humans work, think, and collaborate with AI. If you haven't read Part 1 yet, you can find it here: Part 1: The Cognitive Scientist Redefining AI Productivity.

---

🔄 The Transition Phase: Rethinking the Product and the Process

When we resumed the second half of the interview, Qi had just returned from a string of meetups, events, and late-night writing sessions. The past six months had changed more than he expected -- not only in his startup, but in how he thought about building itself.

The first part of his story focused on how he built Japan's most widely used open-source ASR model and why he now works with Claude as a full-time colleague. But Part 2 moves into a different terrain: what happens when a founder begins to rethink the direction of their product, their habits, and even their day-to-day cognitive rhythms.

When I ask him how his startup has evolved since we last met, he leans back and answers with characteristic precision.

It's been almost a year since we began building. And the more we talk to users, the clearer the gaps become -- not just in our product, but in how people actually work.

Those gaps forced him to reconsider what "product" even meant for an AI-first startup. In Part 1, we talked about his belief that AI shouldn't intrude into calls or generate more clutter. In Part 2, he expands on how their thinking shifted toward deeper questions of workflow continuity and cognitive load.

---

🛠️ Asking Better Questions: What Do Users Actually Need?

Qi admits that in the early days, he and his co-founder fell into the classic first-time founder mistake of building what felt intellectually interesting.

But after a year of conversations with users -- from engineers to researchers to indie hackers -- patterns became visible.

People weren't struggling to do tasks. They were struggling to move between them.

Transitions are where people lose the most energy. You can be productive inside a task, but the switch between tasks destroys your rhythm.

This realization pushed them to revisit core assumptions. Instead of building an assistant that lives in a single app window, they started exploring how to support the invisible parts of work: the mind shifts, the contextual resets, the way your thinking changes depending on who you just talked to or what you just looked at.

Qi frames it simply:

Users don't want another tool. They want less cognitive friction.

And that meant re-evaluating customer acquisition, product positioning, and how they communicate value.

What used to be a feature-focused pitch evolved into a narrative about preserving workflow -- something far more relatable to developers and researchers who live inside dozens of tabs a day.

---

🌙 The AI-Native Lifestyle: Splitting Days, Resetting Minds

One of the most intimate parts of Part 2 was Qi's personal rhythm -- something he rarely discusses publicly.

He reveals that for nearly ten years, he's had a habit of taking long naps in the middle of the day, effectively splitting his day into two separate cognitive cycles.

I literally treat my day as two days. After I wake up from a nap, everything resets. It's a psychological 'new morning.'

This isn't laziness -- it's intentional cognitive design.

The first half of the day is exploratory: reading, brainstorming, planning. The second half is execution-driven. The nap becomes the boundary between two mental modes, allowing him to restart with clarity rather than drag the morning's mental noise forward.

The habit began long before his startup, back when he was doing research in the U.S. and spending evenings collaborating with Japanese teams. The time zone mismatch created two "shifts" by necessity, but Qi eventually realized the structure gave him a cognitive advantage.

He smiles as he explains it:

When I wake up for the second half, I can think from zero again. It's like my brain reboots.

This practice blends surprisingly well with his AI-native workflow.

---

🤖 Becoming "AI-Native" Without Realizing It

As we get deeper into Part 2, Qi shares something unexpectedly personal: for a long time, he didn't realize his relationship with AI was fundamentally different from others.

When Claude released its Max plan, something clicked.

Before that, Qi constantly ran into usage limits -- four hours a day was nowhere near enough for someone who treats AI as a cognitive partner rather than an occasional assistant.

When they launched the Max plan, I felt like the world finally caught up to how I work. I suddenly became a 'normal' user.

I joke that he might be the first person I've met who lives a genuinely AI-native lifestyle. Qi laughs, but doesn't deny it.

AI is not just helping him work faster -- it's shaping how he thinks, structures ideas, and plans his day. And in Part 2, that becomes increasingly clear.

The more Qi talks about transitions, naps, rhythms, and daily resets, the more his connection with Claude feels less like software and more like extended cognition.

---

🔍 Mapping Connections: People, Ideas, and Serendipity

Near the end of the interview, Qi shares a surprising detail. Whenever he meets new people, he writes their names on a board -- not as a memory system, but as a way of mapping relationships.

As we talk, he explains how he often discovers unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated elements: a founder's background, a photographer's eye, a researcher's habit, or a new acquaintance from a meetup.

Every new person changes the shape of the map. You realize their role isn't fixed -- it depends on the context you connect them to.

It's a cognitive scientist's version of networking: observing how concepts, people, and domains interact over time.

This kind of thinking -- relational, dynamic, pattern-driven -- is exactly why his approach to AI is so unusual. His mind doesn't see silos; it sees systems.

---

✨ Summary

Part 2 of the interview pulls back the curtain on Qi's internal world: the rhythms, transitions, and cognitive choices that shape how he works and why his startup is evolving the way it is.

Where Part 1 focused on his model-building, workflow philosophy, and the desire to reduce friction, Part 2 reveals:

• How the startup evolved through deeper user understanding
• Why "transitions" are the hidden cost in modern work
• How Qi splits his day into two cognitive cycles
• What it means to live an AI-native lifestyle
• How he maps relationships and ideas as interconnected systems

Together, both parts form the story of a founder who is not simply building tools -- but rethinking how humans think.

If you haven't read it yet, here's Part 1:
👉 Interview with Qi -- Part 1: The Cognitive Scientist Redefining AI Productivity

---

🎤 Interviewer: Billy Qiu 🧠 Guest: Qi Chen -- CEO & Co-Founder at Paraparas | PhD Cognitive Science 📍 Location: Cafe in Nakameguro, Tokyo, Japan 📅 Date: October 26, 2025