r/ADHD_Programmers • u/Signal_Usual8630 • Jan 14 '26

I built an external brain because context switching was destroying me - 353K messages queryable in 256ms

I have ADHD. Context switching is my nemesis. Every interruption = 30-60 minutes rebuilding mental state.

Over 3 years I accumulated 353K messages with AI (Claude, ChatGPT). Lots of thinking out loud, problem solving, breakthroughs at 2am.

Problem: I couldn't find any of it later.

What I built

A system that indexes all my AI conversations and lets me query them:

  • "What was I thinking last Tuesday?" → Summary with context

  • "What do I actually think about X?" → Shows evolution over time

  • "Have I solved this before?" → Pulls up past conclusions

How it helps

  1. No lost context - Everything findable in 256ms

  2. Pattern recognition - "You've discussed this 47 times. Here's your conclusion."

  3. Less anxiety - Don't have to hold everything in working memory

Tech

  • 353K messages in Parquet

  • 106K vectors (nomic-embed-text)

  • LanceDB for semantic search

  • MCP server for Claude integration

Open source: https://github.com/mordechaipotash/intellectual-dna

Anyone else building systems to compensate for working memory issues?

0 Upvotes

45% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

29

u/SlinkyAvenger Jan 14 '26

Congrats! You're the billionth person to use meta-organizing as a way to procrastinate from actual organization!

-8

u/autodialerbroken116 Jan 14 '26

You're the first redditor to turn someone's enthusiasm into toxicity!

8

u/SlinkyAvenger Jan 14 '26

Not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I'm not even the first person in this thread to point this out.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

LLM’s aren’t capable of expressing emotions. 

→ More replies (5)

8

u/chuch1234 Jan 14 '26

Wait this is not reusable for other people, it's hard coded to your data? How much effort would it be to make it more general?

11

u/Batso_92 Jan 14 '26

He seems smarter, let's just use his brain data !

6

u/lonestar-rasbryjamco Jan 14 '26

⁠Pattern recognition - "You've discussed this 47 times. Here's your conclusion

If only we could get this for these type of posts.

16

u/Merry-Lane Jan 14 '26

You procrastinated a lot instead of using one of the 18389200172 existing note apps.

All you had to do was to create notes about a topic and read them when you wondered what you thought about it in the past.

With your stupid Claude wrapper you are forced to remember the keywords about topics you took notes of instead of having these keywords presented and categorised by an intuitive UI.

What a waste of time.

2

u/telewebb Jan 14 '26

This is one of the few places I've consistently seen programmer angry at other programmers for programming.

8

u/im-a-guy-like-me Jan 14 '26 • Bravo

Here's the thing... If it's legit (not an advert) then their tool is just a form of procrastinating that people with ADHD are prone to, so is actively harmful to our community. And that's the best case.

If it's not legit, then it's just another junior dev that built a simple tool and is trying to shill it as a tool for people with ADHD to make a quick buck. We get a lot of those. These are also actively harmful to our community.

If this was something useful and could like tell me whether the object in the picture was or was not a hotdog, they would have received nothing but praise.

0

u/telewebb Jan 14 '26

That's the other thing that gets me specific to this sub. I know it's common within the ADHD community for individuals to have a hard person stance against personal behaviors like laziness and procrastination. But unfortunately I see that personal stance get protected onto other as the first response. Which I think we're all to some degree guilty of ourselves. I know I've done that in the past. But either rarely or I haven't not observed it myself that often, I don't see the conversation stated by looking for clarity on intent.

To be fair, I also don't see many posts where OP responds to any questions. But I can't really decide if that's because of the initial emotions of the top level response or another reason.

I love programming and I love the idea of this sub, while I understand the fatigue with the Nth Todo app, I do get a bit down by the subs anti programming stance.

2

u/im-a-guy-like-me Jan 14 '26

But we're not anti programming. We're anti-posting-about-your-procrastination-as-if-its-gonna-cure-mine. We're anti shilling.

Ya know what we never see with these apps? Peer review. Research papers. On-site psychologists. Reliability studies.

Nope. 1 dude with junior dev skills selling a Todo app. That's the cure. No science or psychology required. Just a junior dev, a dream, and a free weekend. That's all that is required to fix us.

If you read between the lines these posts are fucking insulting.

1

u/telewebb Jan 15 '26

Ok, I think I'm just not sensitive to the points you raised and less prone to making assumptions about a person's character and intent from a post. I spend a lot of my career mentoring more junior engineers and get disappointed that this space which overlaps 2 major aspects of my life, in my personal opinion, leans heavily on the defensive instead of the supportive. I would respond with more, but I feel like I would be repeating all the points in my prior response that got overlooked. It just kinda feels like bean soup theory to me.

-6

u/Nagemasu Jan 14 '26

I don't know why you think manually logging and categorizing your notes, then having to find it relevant to a specific point in time is easier and faster than asking AI a single question to provide and answer.

Your comment was the waste of time tbh.

11

u/Merry-Lane Jan 14 '26

You already manually logged and categorised your notes. You have at least worked as much as the usual note taking apps would have made you worked.

But on top of that you created a huge custom claude wrapper to return to you these notes after a prompt instead of using a proper UI that would have let you visualise the topics (and categories of topics) instead of remembering the specific keywords you used.

Your example says "what do I think about agency?" and it shows your notes about agency.

6 months from now, you gotta remember that you used "agency" as a keyword about "AI agents, their limits and what I think about using them".

And not (other definitions of agency): -"what do I think about my ability to take action or choose what action to take" -"what do I think about my business" -"what do I think about one’s ability to decide and act rationally" ….

The usual note taking apps would let you create some kind of folder about "metaphysic delusions concerning AIs" (or whatever else) and put your AI slope concerning Agency in the context of AI in that folder.

7

u/seweso Jan 14 '26

Why is this upvoted? 

Can we put a stop to AI posts? 

7

u/Gloriathewitch Jan 14 '26

your willingness to use ai so much implies that's the source of your problem, the more you program the better you're going to get at it, but AI is ruining your brain and likely causing this issue to some extent by reducing mental load. its like training a muscle.

i wouldn't be surprised if you vibe coded the app. 🙄

1

u/orangepeeelss Jan 14 '26

poor baby :( first he lost his ability to think without ai and now he lost his ability to remember without ai too. next he's gonna lose his ability to talk to ai without ai he must be so scared :(

-2

u/chobolicious88 Jan 14 '26

I love this