My Interview with The Free Press

I never expected my Claude Blue post on Reddit to travel all the way to the US. A reporter at an American independent outlet read it, went through my Medium blog carefully, and then asked me for an interview. From how detailed his questions were, I could tell this topic was resonating in the US, not only in Korea. Most of his questions were philosophical rather than technical. "Why choose the painful path on purpose?" "If the people building AI's future are depressed, is that future going to be okay?" The conversation meant a lot to me, so I'm putting the full interview here for the record.

The reporter was Evan Gardner of The Free Press, the largest publication on Substack in the US. You can read his article here.

1. Career, and the First Encounter with AI

Evan: Can you tell me about how you first got into tech and what made you decide to pursue it full-time?

Patrick: I went to high school and college in the States. University of Michigan. I'm originally from Korea, so after graduating I moved back. I started my career on the business side, not engineering. My first company was LINE, which is essentially an Asian super-app, sort of a messenger-based equivalent to what Facebook was in the West. A close friend who'd gotten into the tech industry ahead of me pulled me in.

What's a bit unusual about my trajectory is that I also spent time in entertainment. I love music, so I pivoted into the K-pop industry. Sounds like a completely different world, but my domain was always strategy and marketing, so the core of what I was doing stayed the same. I've worked across two industries that couldn't look more different on paper, but they shared one thing: both put me at the edge of wherever the trend was moving. Back then, K-pop was pushing into the U.S. mainstream, and the tech company I'd been at before was expanding across Asia. Then in 2024, I joined an AI startup. ChatGPT had just exploded, and a company that was going all-in on building with AI felt like the next frontier. That's what pulled me in.

Evan: Was there also an element of security or betting on the future by choosing these jobs?

Patrick: That's a good question. When I was fresh out of college, I believed that the younger you are, the more risk you should take. I wanted to challenge myself while I still had that latitude, and I trusted that being at the forefront of something would pay off down the road. That's how I thought about it then, and honestly, I still do.

Evan: Do you remember the first time you came into contact with AI and realized it could really have an impact on your life?

Patrick: When ChatGPT 3 and 4 came out. That was only a couple of years ago, but the moment I used it, I knew this was fundamentally different. There were AI-adjacent services before, but the gap between pre-ChatGPT and post-ChatGPT was unmistakable.

And then there's my grandfather. He's 93 years old, and he started using ChatGPT almost immediately. No tech background whatsoever. Just a regular grandpa. But he's always had a restless mind, full of questions. His age makes it hard to articulate what he's thinking, and he has some hearing issues. He told me that talking to AI was just easier. It helped him organize his thoughts, get answers, communicate. That moment showed me something bigger: AI isn't just going to reshape tech or business. It's going to reshape the entire human landscape.

Evan: I'd love if you could elaborate on what you mean by the human landscape.

Patrick: Usually when a new technology arrives, it's younger generations who adapt quickly while older generations struggle. That's the standard pattern. But AI broke that pattern. My 93-year-old grandfather adapted with no friction at all. The spread of this technology isn't bound by region or generation. It's almost universal, like a germ that spreads effortlessly. That's what I mean when I say this is a human thing. Not a generational thing, not a particular demographic. It touches everyone. And I think that's what makes AI genuinely different from anything we've seen before.

2. How AI Entered Daily Life

Evan: Can you tell me what your day-to-day work looks like and how Claude has made its way into it?

Patrick: I do growth marketing. Promoting the company, building the brand, attracting users. And honestly, even though I work at an AI company, I wouldn't say I was truly AI-native until last year. I was still doing things the way I'd always done them, relying on my own skills rather than leaning on AI.

The turning point was last December. We set our company motto for this year: "AI-native company." Anyone can say that, and we all know most companies don't actually live it. So we decided to push ourselves, even if it felt clumsy at first. Starting in January, whenever I needed to build a presentation, organize meeting notes, or write a blog, I deliberately stopped doing it by hand and forced myself to use AI. In the beginning, prompt engineering was honestly harder than just writing things myself. But once I got the hang of it, both speed and quality improved dramatically.

Now Claude is my default app. I don't open Gmail. I don't go into Google Workspace. I don't even check Slack for messages anymore. I draft documents in Claude Code or Cowork, share them from there, and when I have anywhere from a few dozen to a hundred emails stacked up, I just ask Claude to prioritize them and handle it from there.

Evan: You mentioned in your blog that we've moved from the excitement phase to the "what to do" phase about AI. Can you tell me about that progression?

Patrick: In the beginning, everyone was excited. We were too. We thought we could build a sustainable business on top of AI, and until last year, that made sense. But this year, something shifted. Originally, companies like OpenAI and Google were building general AI, and everyone else was carving out niche applications on top of it. That was the prevailing logic. But now, led by Claude especially, the foundation model companies are reaching directly into niche business domains. In software and productivity in particular, the room for improvement that startups used to occupy is shrinking fast.

I have a friend who founded a company in Silicon Valley. He told me that AI software is becoming a declining industry. That was jarring to hear. Tech and software were always synonymous with growth. But he's seriously considering stepping away from software. Half-jokingly, half-seriously, he's been thinking about opening a restaurant. A decidedly old-school business. That tells you something about where the mood has shifted.

3. What Is Claude Blue?

Evan: For someone who might not be familiar with your blogs or this experience at all, how would you describe what Claude Blue feels like?

Patrick: Claude Blue is a term I coined myself, modeled after "COVID Blue," the collective depression people felt during the pandemic. At its core, it's AI depression. It's the feeling that arrives after the excitement fades, and what replaces it is a sense that your existence as a human no longer quite holds up.

Humans have always been at the top of the pyramid. Top of the food chain. Not because of physical superiority, but because our mental intelligence allowed us to build tools, weapons, machines, and essentially control every other species. That position gave us confidence. But now it feels like there's an alien species living alongside us, one that will eventually surpass us. That feeling of inferiority is what makes people feel awkward, exposed, even fragile. It's not just a career anxiety or a business problem. It's an identity crisis. "Am I still worth something? Is the human species still worth extending?" Those are the kinds of questions people are quietly sitting with.

Evan: Before you coined the term and started doing these interviews, did you have any precursors of Claude Blue yourself?

Patrick: Our company has a lot of engineers, and they'd been talking about AI anxiety and depression since last year. I was aware of it intellectually, but I wasn't feeling it myself. Which was ironic, because I knew AI would eventually come for my skills too. I just wasn't experiencing the emotional weight the way the engineers were. So I started asking my non-engineer friends if they were feeling any of it. And what surprised me was that none of them were. They were still in the excitement phase. Hadn't crossed into any kind of existential discomfort yet.

That made me ask a harder question: Is this just an engineer problem? Or have business people simply not reached that stage yet? My conclusion is that AI is going to hit the business side even harder than the engineers. It's just a matter of timing. Engineers felt it first because the way they work is structurally similar to how LLMs work: formulating hypotheses and verifying them in a highly structured process. Business work is messier and less structured, so AI hasn't fully penetrated it yet. But watching how Claude Code and Cowork are evolving, I can see it coming. That's why I wanted to share what the engineers were already experiencing, as a kind of early warning. It's not going to be much different for the rest of us.

4. Competing with AI, and When Thinking Starts to Feel Unproductive

Evan: You wrote about thinking feeling unproductive. Can you tell me what you meant by that and what experience you were having?

Patrick: Comparing yourself to AI isn't fair. I know that. But there's this strange tension where you're almost racing against it. From a company's perspective, it's either you or AI. I'd been thinking of myself as the manager, the one directing the AI. But when you realize that the thing you're managing is vastly better than you at execution, the dynamic gets uncomfortable.

You input a prompt, assign a complex task, and AI finishes it in minutes. Maybe an hour for something really involved. But to use AI well, you need to plan carefully first. You spend thirty minutes on that planning, hand it off, and the AI delivers in a fraction of the time. In that moment, there's a hollow feeling. Who's really in charge here? I always assumed I was above the AI, that I was the one running things. But the reality is almost the opposite. That gap between what you contribute and what AI contributes creates this persistent sense that something is off. An awkwardness you can't quite shake.

5. Between Excitement and Dread: Two Paths

Evan: You wrote on Reddit that you've been going back and forth between excitement and dread for months. What goes through your mind on each of those days?

Patrick: It depends on whether you're an engineer or on the business side. I just had a call with a friend who works at Google HQ as an AI engineer, and every engineer says roughly the same thing. There are two paths. One is to start your own business, because AI will eventually replace you anyway. The other is to go really deep into R&D, building the foundational models themselves rather than applications on top of them.

On the business side, I've been candid with our executives that we should stay open to ventures outside of tech and software. We're asking ourselves: what are the areas that foundation model companies won't bother expanding into? Looking at Harvey, the legal AI company, domains like finance, law, and healthcare carry so much regulatory and liability risk that the foundation model companies don't want to touch them. There's a narrow window there.

And here's something a bit out of left field. I recently came across a U.S. startup that has nothing to do with AI. They're running a subscription service for sunlight. They attach mirrors to satellites and let you press a button on your phone at midnight to reflect light down to your location. Bizarre and wild, but I found it captivating precisely because people are tired of hearing "AI agent this, AI something that." It's become a cliché. Sometimes the craziest non-AI idea is the one that actually captures attention. And since I studied psychology in college, I keep thinking that anything deeply rooted in human psychology is territory AI can't fully claim. That's where my mind keeps going.

6. Have You Experienced Claude Blue Yourself?

Evan: Would you say you've reached a place where you've experienced Claude Blue?

Patrick: Honestly, not fully. Not yet. And I don't think that's a good sign. The people who've pushed AI to its absolute limit, the way engineers have, are the ones who reach that phase. I'm still somewhere between excitement and the blue. By my own definition, that means I'm still in the early stages of truly using AI. I tell my friends: if you're not feeling Claude Blue, that doesn't mean you're using AI well. It means you haven't used it enough. Push it as far as the engineers have, and you'll start to feel something different. You'll feel like AI is encroaching on your identity. Ironically, I'm actively trying to get there.

Evan: Most people would hear that and ask: if the end result is an existence that feels worse, why is it worth pushing AI that hard? What's the point?

Patrick: That's a great question, and maybe you're right. This might not be the answer for everyone. But for me, being in the AI and tech industry means I feel the pressure to stay at the forefront. My wife, on the other hand, works in a completely different field. She doesn't feel that pressure at all. She doesn't think AI is going to replace everyone. And honestly, I don't want to project my pressure onto anyone else. Everyone has different lifestyles and different paths.

Evan: Do you ever feel envious that she doesn't have that pressure? Is there an ignorance-is-bliss element?

Patrick: Sometimes. But I keep coming back to the Matrix analogy. Red pill or blue pill. Some people choose the blue pill and stay in the Matrix. I'm the kind of person who wants to see reality, even if it's uncomfortable. I want to know what's underneath.

So when I'm feeling really down and confused, I'll talk to my wife about life. And in those moments, I'm reminded that there's a whole world outside of AI depression. The world is still turning. You don't want to trap yourself in a small hole. Talking to her gives me fresh air. But I'm still the person who wants to understand what's ahead, even if I might be wrong. I'd rather ask the questions and try to figure it out.

7. If the People Building AI's Future Are Depressed, Is That Future Safe?

Evan: Does it worry you that the engineers who have their hands in building AI's future are feeling more and more disillusioned? Is that future at risk if people are feeling Claude Blue and want to stop coding?

Patrick: Here's the thing: we're all human. Our emotions aren't static. I was just talking to an engineer at my company, and he said that after work, when he's alone, he feels that depression. But when he's around friends or colleagues, it lifts. Emotions flip like a coin. They ride up and down like a roller coaster. If someone were 100% blue, 24/7, that would be disastrous. But the reality is that it fluctuates.

And conversations like this one actually help clear the air. If you're just sitting alone with your thoughts, you can spiral deep into negative territory. But humans talk to friends. We talk to strangers sometimes. We talk to colleagues. That pulls us back. The fact that engineers are speaking up about this, on Reddit, in person, wherever, signals that they want to move past it. They want a brighter future. I take that as a fundamentally hopeful sign.

8. Claude Blue in the Field

Evan: Can you share one or two of the most powerful stories of Claude Blue you've heard from engineers within your own company?

Patrick: One of them takes a music class on weekends. She loves composing. Her music teacher, who has zero technical background, built a music game using Claude Code. You press keys on a keyboard, and the screen tells you whether you hit the right note or the wrong one. No coding experience whatsoever. That shook our engineer for two reasons. First, the barrier to building even basic software has dropped that low. Second, she couldn't have built that game herself, because she doesn't have the music teacher's domain knowledge. Engineers used to be seen as specialists, almost like doctors or lawyers. Now they've become something closer to generalists. That realization hit hard.

The other story comes from someone I met after publishing the Claude Blue blog. A man in his mid-forties running a one-person garment business. Nothing to do with tech. He needed an internal CRM tool to track inventory and manage partner companies. He originally approached a development agency, and they quoted him two months with six or seven people. Too expensive, too slow, and communicating his requirements to engineers was its own headache. So he used Lovable, a vibe coding tool, and built the CRM himself in a single day. It worked perfectly. The reason it worked is that he'd been in that business for fifteen years. He knew exactly what he needed. The only thing he'd ever been missing was the technical ability to build it. Now that barrier is gone. Domain knowledge has become more powerful than technical skill. That's the shift.

That was the end of a dense thirty minutes, and we wrapped up by thanking each other. Honestly, I was the one who felt grateful. A journalist had taken an anonymous Reddit post seriously and reached out right away, which still amazes me. I'm curious to see where this piece I put out into the world goes next.

Originally published in Korean on Brunch, March 31, 2026.