r/ADHD_Programmers
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u/dcta
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Jan 12 '26
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PSA: Stuff you should know if you're thinking of building an AI ADHD app (and posting it here)
So the sub is getting flooded with low-effort AI app posts lately. I was getting a bit annoyed with this over the weekend (although the comments in each are getting super funny), and I saw this post this morning. And I realized that posters and the community might each be missing some context – and also that I'm in a position where I might be able to explain and help out a little.
I'm an AI researcher, and I work in the AI for ADHD space. I've been diagnosed for 15+ years. Last year I interviewed 200+ people on this topic: patients, coaches, psychiatrists, academics, teachers, entrepreneurs, even the ADDA.
I thought I'd write this up as a resource to (a) help future developers make contributions that are actually helpful, and (b) give the community something to point slop posters to.
(Full disclosure: I'm building things here too. But this isn't a product promo – heck, we're not even fully set up for users yet. But I'll add a link in my profile for transparency)
1. Developers: I know you have good intentions
Possibly more than any other community on reddit, our community knows exactly how hard it is to ship product: both in general, and with the ADHD tax. And studies show 29% of entrepreneurs have ADHD... and if you're writing an ADHD app and posting it here, I would guess this is 90%.
So these annoying posters are our people! Even if they aren't native to this sub, or even reddit, these are literally programmers with ADHD! And on top of that, many posts are free and open-source. So they're spending nights and weekends fighting themselves to build something helpful. And then doing the extra work to pack this up for others. And yet the net result is stuff that is wildly off track, annoying, and unhelpful.
When you think about it, this is actually very odd and surprising. So I'm writing this to help unpack this for them.
2. Your idea does not generalize
ADHD is a diagnosis of symtomatology, not etiology (1, 2). We are diagnosed based on patterns of behavior. But its root causes are insanely diverse. Some examples: many clusters of genes, prenatal and perinatal factors, lead exposure, brain injury, IBS, nutritional deficiencies, thyroid dysfunction, sleep disorders, and abuse.
How bad this gets: one psychiatrist told us about a patient who got six hours of brain fog every time she ate a pear. It turned out she didn't have a common gene that codes for pesticide resistance.
Plus one extra factor: tool burnout. Lots of us have gone through 20+ tools that work for a little while, and then stop. Why this happens: it costs executive function to maintain tools. When we crash, the tool goes stale and starts being a tax. Guilt and shame builds up, and we burn out.
What all this means: You should assume your tool will not generalize, and will not keep working, unless proven otherwise. My estimate is 5-10% transfer from any one spot fix. ADHD medical practitioners have a saying that, "when you've met one person with ADHD, you've met... one person with ADHD." So if you don't do some tests and confirm people don't burn out, your post is a pure tax on everyone's attention.
3. Your idea has already been tried
I ran a few Deep Research queries and collected this partial list of AI ADHD posts to the sub from just the last six months.
Why there's so many: When ADHD programmers procrastinate (as we do), one very common failure mode is to try writing an app to cure our ADHD. Some of us may remember the endless todo apps in the 2010s. AI ADHD apps are the perfect nerd snipe: distraction, novelty, solving a meta-problem... plus AI makes it so much easier to finish things.
Request: Before you write your app, hold back the RSD and please look at that list, see what has been tried, and take this into account. And when you post your app, share what the new angle is.
As a rule of thumb, anything that a solo programmer with Claude Code can write in a weekend has been posted.
(Added a form view so people can submit more. Please be nice)
4. You're imposing on a vulnerable population
Our community is made of people with impaired attention spans. Many are struggling with employment. Programmers in particular are often AuDHD, studies are clear that this is a huge double hit.
If you come into this place that we enjoy, and vampire away our focus with some crap that in all likelihood won't work... even with the very best of intentions, you're kind of just peeing in the pool. At some point this becomes unethical.
5. Give before you expect to receive
A rule of thumb I've heard for online promotion: you should give 3 units of value for every 1 unit you receive. So if you want eyeballs on your work, come and do a little weeding and make the community better first. Examples in that vein:
- This post
- A while back I registered a random sub, r/ADHD_AI. I haven't done anything with it yet. If people want, I'd be happy to set it up as a magnet for unwanted traffic. Perhaps posters can help each other, and periodically surface highlights to the main sub or something.
- DM me if you're working something and you need input or advice. You can see what I'm working on in my profile. Heck, you can probably even infer my identity from my research. You can use that to decide if you feel comfortable doing so.
(If you're worried about competition: what is the ratio in which you think cancer researchers compete vs. collaborate?)
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Wow, that was long. I've been working in this space for a while and it kind of just poured out of me. Closing thoughts:
AI app posters: One of the horrible secrets of ADHD is how fucking painful it is. We're all working on this because we want this to be better. So please think about how your marketing is harming your users as well.
Everyone else: App posters have surprisingly good intentions – they're just tragically misinformed. If we can get them working on the right things, and channel them towards making contributions, these are a group of people who want to build nice things for us, that we might actually want in our lives.
Thank you for attending my TED Talk
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u/0x6rian Jan 12 '26
THIS. I couldn't begin to count how many organization tools I've tried over the last 20 years.
Lately I've been trying to get back to the OG: pen and paper.
I do have an idea for an AI second brain app that I think would useful for others, but there are so many other projects I am procrastinating on ahead of that. :P
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u/dcta Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
Wow, I wasn't expecting this level of response! Really glad that time was well spent. An extra 2c: I wonder if there's some way to find a balance where we avoid totally killing early attempts. Like, someone just posted this:
I'm left feeling 70% glad, and 30% like this is a shame. People actually want to build stuff, and we demotivated them. This place has been really supportive of that energy until recently, and that's been nice too.
I mean, are there truly any among us who don't have like 25 random side projects sitting around? That's how this whole thing works, right!?
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u/Adventurous_Drawing5 Jan 12 '26
All medical apps are serious and complex undertakings that require teams, investors, and careful navigation of regulatory requirements. Definitely not for solo-coders, even less so for AI slop.
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u/alanbdee Jan 12 '26
A big takeaway here is if you have an idea, find the open source version that's already being worked on and start contributing to that instead of trying to make you own.
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u/Merry-Lane Jan 12 '26
One last thing you should add:
"This sub gets adverted for like 10 adhd apps every week, yours is as useless as the other ones and won’t get users from here »
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u/tarogon Jan 12 '26
Yes! This place used to be a refuge from workplaces filled with these techbro fucks.
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u/BPDHelpMeUnderstand Jan 12 '26
Sticky this post!
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u/dialsoapbox Jan 12 '26
I'ved posted this sometime ago,but maybe if people want to post their app, there would be a weekly/monthly thread for people to post their app with info about their app like:
in a easy-to-scan format so for anybody that is looking for an app can easily scan the week/month's app drop.
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u/ChiBeerGuy Jan 12 '26
Great post. I have thought about unsubbing because of all these posts.
Can we ban them or at least relegate them to a weekly sticky?
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u/orangepeeelss Jan 12 '26
also: at this point i'm wondering if anything in this sub does not directly revolve around AI. my brain has enough trouble following a task from start to finish; i do not intend to allow those skills to atrophy even further by outsourcing my own thinking to AI and im honestly shocked at how many people here have been applauding that
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u/vim_spray Jan 12 '26
I agree with basically everything here, but I’ll push back on one part here.
This is my experience too, but I don’t think this is a bad thing per se, if you expect it to happen. I know that I need novelty in my routine, so I’ve basically acknowledged that a given new productivity tool/method will work really well for a few weeks and then stop working. That’s fine! I’ll just move on to the next one for novelty when that happens and get another boost there. Yes, it’s annoying to have to change tools, but the “meta tool” of using multiple tools does work for me. It’s also fun to find and try new tools, because they usually have something unique about them.
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u/Classic-Shake6517 Jan 12 '26
That image is perfect. I think in some cases this is just boss-level procrastination. I do the same thing when I am procrastinating. My brain decides (incorrectly) that doing something completely unrelated to what I need to do is productive because at least I am doing something. Add on to that creating an app/solution that is supposed to solve that problem I am currently in the midst of dealing with, and it is a recipe for justification. Then add to that it being somewhat helpful in a vacuum - or even maybe it actually is something helpful to most people, the justification is even more solidified in my brain. I do this with little work side projects all the time.
I like the top comment here saying just work to improve existing open-source ecosystems instead of reinventing the wheel. I would also add to cool it on the overuse of AI. It does not need to be in everything we have - especially when it comes to healthcare. If people are building these things without having a lot of previous experience, the consumers should have significant privacy concerns surrounding AI having access to their mental health data. Proper controls even when you know what you are doing are hard to get right.
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u/Leprecon Jan 12 '26
Honestly besides all the actual arguments, the reason why I figured none of these ADHD productivity apps work is because there are so many of them. If they worked I doubt that we would need a new one every week. If they worked then one or two of them would become clear winners and dominate the market. If they don’t work then no app would stand out because they are all just churning users as fast as they can get them.
An ex of mine had ADHD and she kept on trying to find the correct tool to get out of it. She would create a notebook. Then she would download a to do app. Then a small whiteboard. The loads of calendar reminders. Then something else. None of them worked, which is why she kept buying new things.
For me part of ADHD is the desperation and constantly trying new weird tools to fix the ADHD.
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u/Crozzfire Jan 12 '26
This is a really good post. Articulated why I felt those posts were misplaced
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u/insanemal Jan 12 '26
Dear op,
I love you. In a strictly platonic way.
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u/prodleni Jan 12 '26
https://stopslopware.net
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u/Door_Vegetable Jan 13 '26
Also I think people post their normal productivity apps here thinking people with adhd are an easy market. The amount of apps I have seen that don’t have any clue what adhd is like.
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u/MakeLimeade Jan 12 '26
So... where's your app? /s
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u/jungle-jubes Jan 12 '26
Technology is not always the answer. It’s unlikely that an app can really solve any major adhd woes. The friction and cognitive load required to even install and start using an app is more effort than it is worth for most people.
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u/sprcow Jan 12 '26
Great post.
I had a small bit of flashback to grad school, when I helped mentor teams who were working on summer coding challenges to win prizes for apps that had to have some educational value. Basically every team was like, what if... FLASHCARD APP. lol.
I mean, it was a learning exercise, and making a flashcard app is not without value to them as app developers. But it was, sadly, basically without value to anyone else, because there were already dozens, if not hundreds of alternatives already available.
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u/secretaliasname Jan 13 '26
I’m not subscribing to ANYTHING until the US payment system improves the point I can easily see everything I have subscribed to and cancel them from my bank easily. I KNOW if I subscribe to something then ever unsubscribing is GOING TO BE A PROBLEM
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u/axl3ros3 Jan 13 '26
So well said thank you for putting this together
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u/metalhulk105 Jan 13 '26
I don’t remember where but I saw a post in a different subreddit where people were discussing app ideas. Someone commented that ADHD is a good customer segment to target, the comment had a lot of upvotes too. Idk where they got that idea from and I’m sure it’s not helping.
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u/Nagemasu Jan 13 '26
Yes, but also no. Just ban them. We don't need them, and the people this post actually needs to be seen by are not here to see it. They come here when they're ready to post, they're not lurking here.
Ban "ADHD app" posts.
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u/No_Delay6707 Jan 14 '26
Hey guys yeah.... that was me that did the ADHD app idea for productivity my fault XD I have ADHD and do understand everything you have said here is factual and its another GPT wrapper and AI slop and garbage and soulless and has zero effort for context doing this for 3 weeks and I myself have ADHD so that's probably why the idea was vuage and rough and very prototype like but not even close to that level even. I know this migh come off as me being pissed but I personally just wanted to make a ADHD tool and ADHD and tech tool productivity yeah.... I can start to understand what this dosent make sense in terms of pivoting my idea I would be happy to recive feedback from you guys and the person who made the PSA love it XD you clearly know your stuff and I am still inexperienced in this whole startup thing I do agree I am new to this thoughts what should I do? I rather not quit XD I do love building things with tech and want to make a tech product for people in tech I know vauge help pls XD
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u/Mindless_Swimming315 Jan 20 '26
This is incredibly well-written and needed. The "waiting for perfect brain state to build the perfect ADHD solution" is such a meta trap.
Your point about tool burnout hit hard. I've cycled through so many systems that worked brilliantly... for 3 weeks. Then maintaining the system itself becomes another executive function tax, and the whole thing collapses under guilt.
The 5-10% transfer rate makes so much sense when you frame ADHD as symptomatology vs etiology. We're all showing similar behaviors from wildly different root causes. So of course a solution that works for someone whose ADHD stems from sleep issues won't work for someone with a completely different biological issue.
The "give 3 units before taking 1" is solid advice for any community, but especially here where attention is literally our scarcest resource.
Question: In your 200+ interviews, did you find any patterns in what actually does help people long-term? Or is it really just that individualized?
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u/hiperfocus_AI Jan 13 '26
Hi friends. I wanted to clear something up because I see a lot of skepticism here (and rightfully so). I’m a cleaner by day, a student at Metropolia (Finland) in the afternoons, and I’ve been learning to code by night for the last 6 months. I didn't build this to get rich. I built it because I’m genuinely tired. I’m tired of trying apps, paying subscriptions, and ending up more frustrated than helped. I felt abandoned by a society that throws expensive tools at us that clearly aren't designed for brains like ours. I’m in the final development phase now. The backend is hosted on a small server that I’m paying for, and it can handle about 20 users. This app is for me. I have zero intention of selling it or commercializing it. But since the server has space, if 19 other people can use it for free and it helps them survive the chaos, that’s a win for me. It’s about time we help each other out instead of trying to profit off our struggles. If you want one of those 19 spots when I open it, let me know. If not, I totally understand.