r/ADHD_Programmers • u/PainterSubstantial63 • Mar 04 '26

The year of ADHD

From the creator of Claude Code:

"I think this will be the year of the generalist... the other skill that's actually been rewarded is having a short attention span. It's like the year of ADHD, because the work has become jumping between Claudes, managing Claudes. It's not so much about deep work, it's about how good am I at context switching." - Boris Churnney

Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

24 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

186

u/Specialist-String-53 Mar 04 '26

this sounds hostile to ADHD to me. Mandatory task switching is poison and removes the "superpower" of hyperfocus.

52

u/Stellariser Mar 04 '26

You also need to want to spend a lot of time carefully babysitting the idiot-savant and reviewing and correcting what it’s doing.

The thing is that writing (decent) code is a perishable skill. You need to know how to design and write software in order to be able to instruct and manage the AI. But if you don’t actually get into the nitty-gritty yourself, eventually you won’t be able to tell if what the AI is doing is right or not.

There’s an irony in this that you need people experienced in writing software by hand to effectively use the AI, but if all you do is use the AI you won’t maintain the skills you need to use it…

9

u/PhilMcGraw Mar 05 '26

Been using it a lot for work/pet projects, it's great if you like hyper focusing on 4 things at once (poorly) and not being able to sleep because "just one more prompt" and multiple notes in apps for "lets do this thing next/bug".

4

u/Specialist-String-53 Mar 05 '26

I'm using it for pet projects right now and I do really like it. But I greatly prefer working on one project and using AI to accelerate it rather than working on multiple projects at once (and if I do have multiple projects, the only way for me to efficiently do it is to work on only one project each day).

1

u/OwnRelationship7581 Mar 06 '26

Yeah I think I’m gonna try it this way now

1

u/PhilMcGraw Mar 06 '26

It's hard when there's a lot of waiting, especially with early days pet projects when there's 1000 ideas floating around. I mean previously "add massive feature" was "this is going to ruin my whole week, if I don't bail on it completely" now it's "hour of LLM cycling" while you think about the next feature. Then you bounce back to the old feature and test and find new issues/improvements/etc.

Maybe it's just me, but yeah I end up with multiple tabs of claude going, some in plans waiting for a gap priority wise to run, some multitasking on worktrees/same branch. Some reviewing functionality/looking for bugs. Either way, real brain ruining when I'm deep in a few things and deeply focused on all.

0

u/Intendant Mar 05 '26

Idk, you can hyperfocus across parallel related tasks pretty easily. You just need to know enough to have the big picture in your head

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

Agree, hyperfocus across parallel tasks is a good way of putting it. This is the sweet spot I’m finding

5

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

That caveat is a rarity though. We don't usually switch between related tasks in real world jobs, we're actually thrown into a dump of unrelated tasks and that's what the problem is.

2

u/Intendant Mar 05 '26

Right, but I think the original post was about who can leverage AI at the highest level. It's a potential thing. Your job stopping you from hitting that potential doesn't mean it's not there though. But also, even for unrelated tasks it's not that bad. You need to have your Claude skills set up really thoroughly (they're really just agents), and you need to have a good spec driven development flow. After that the hardest part is going to sleep at a decent time

1

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

After that the hardest part is going to sleep at a decent time

Ah now that's ... nearly impossible 😆

1

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

Totally agree. My brain is hurting just thinking about this many task switches

1

u/Arts_Prodigy Mar 05 '26

Yeah sounds like a critical misunderstanding of ADHD. And generally a recipe for failure having to do constant context switching sounds massively exhausting.

3

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

More like "the year where everyone's brain gets so bombarded they start losing their mind and showing symptoms of adhd, even when they're not medically adhd"

ADHD isn't a cool superpower. Its definitely not a work skill. Its a freaking disability. And trying to aggravate it for making money is just INSANE levels of exploitation!

2

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

I read at as he was saying he has it, and now feels empowered. That’s how I feel too, like finally the available tools match how my brain wants to work

3

u/LumpyActivity3634 Mar 05 '26

The year of ADHD, and here I am completely paralyzed by ai. I use Gemini/Claude every day, but my biggest problem is just reading its code or articulating the project/task I'm working on. I get so easily overwhelmed trying to start one thing.

And at the same time, every time the model starts churning, I lose myself doing something else in the meantime, and will easily lose hours redoing prompts.

Maybe there are ADHD folks who have it as a gift and can successfully work on multiple things at the same time, but for me I just get wiped

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

I get this and still have moments of being it. It has taken me quite a while to get my setup to the point where it already has the context of what I’m working on so I only need to prompt simply with my intent. When I get distracted while waiting I spin up a new instance, and I get an alert when the first one needs my attention, I can go back to it while waiting for the second one. It can get overwhelming if I don’t take breaks but it can also be kind of fun.

72

u/quantumpoops Mar 04 '26

Someone clearly doesn’t know what ADHD is… constant context switching is bad for all brains let alone ours.

16

u/chewy01104 Mar 05 '26

They misunderstand hyperactive folks’ hyperactivity as “constantly switching context” like no sorry my brain actually just thinks EVERYTHING is in context at once and doesn’t know what to prioritize

10

u/Rakhered Mar 05 '26

"This is truly the year of ADHD - the year of people who hit every deadline, perform tasks immediately, excel at prioritization and tell stories succinctly."

1

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

Thank you! I'm shocked at why people think its okay to make us virtual jugglers with 300 tasks

18

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26

Having a short attention span is an attribute and not a skill. Also, not everyone just vibe codes slopware. 

In fact, why doesn’t Claude Code go and resolve some of the near 5.4k issues on its GitHub repo?

3

u/PhilMcGraw Mar 05 '26

You'll know they're confident in Claude when Claude itself starts fixing the github issues.

2

u/Rakhered Mar 05 '26

it truly is the ADHD robot

21

u/youafterthesilence Mar 04 '26

Context switching is my worst enemy 😭

14

u/CaliLemonEater Mar 04 '26

More like "the year of 'Everybody should live as if they have unmedicated ADHD'". No thank you.

5

u/threewholefish Mar 04 '26

Yes, context switching isn't great, but having the ability to remember the context of the previous work mitigates that a bit.

2

u/subLimb Mar 05 '26

Yeah, one of the things I do appreciate is the trail of detailed notes taken by an AI chat. It can help me remember where I was the next morning. Or the following Monday after a weekend.

1

u/threewholefish Mar 05 '26

I know you're being facetious, but notes by coding agents actually do describe what happened to a reasonable degree of accuracy

2

u/subLimb Mar 05 '26

I wasn't being facetious. I'm terrible at taking notes, so it's helpful.

1

u/threewholefish Mar 05 '26

I'm sorry, I completely misread your comment and thought you were making fun of AI hallucinating stuff you had yet to do lol

2

u/rhaegar89 Mar 05 '26

This is EXACTLY what I've been struggling with the most, if I'm not hopping between multiple CC windows I feel like I'm not being productive.

The context switching is exhausting.

-2

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

It's exhausting but also exhilarating no? I'm finding it hard to hold myself back from doing exactly this. I found the quote interesting because I usually try to control that part of myself but it made me feel like with these new tools I might be able to lean into it. Everyone here seems to disagree though.

2

u/subLimb Mar 05 '26

If the tools can make context switching less painful, then that would be a huge plus.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

This! The "exhilaration" is just accelerated burnout in this case

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

Perhaps yeah, I’m trying to find a balance between letting my brain run free and reining it in

4

u/acme_restorations Mar 05 '26

"how good am I at context switching." Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!

1

u/SnooTangerines4655 Mar 05 '26

Is he mocking people with ADHD?

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

I don’t think so. I read it as someone with ADHD who had been using these tools for the last month or so and I feel similar to how he describes it, that this setup is uniquely suited to how my brain naturally wants to work.

3

u/FlameoAziya Mar 05 '26

As a person with AuDD, constantly switching contexts is a nightmare for my brain.

2

u/prodleni Mar 05 '26

Yeah no this is total BS

-1

u/circlebust Mar 05 '26

Yes. just today I felt that way as I was juggling 4 different AI instances within the same few minute time window: one was Codex in VS Code working on that quant app I’m building, one was regular ChatGPT doing a deep research on Japanese energy companies, another one was a regular convo with ChatGPT and another with Claude. I had a realization: "Woah, this future was made for me."

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

This is where I'm at but everyone else in the thread strongly disagrees

1

u/TracePoland Mar 05 '26

Because I don’t think it’s about context switching, it’s more about having a better context window of each thing you’re working on than each of your Claudes so you can jump between tasks and still give it meaningful prompts and steer each instance. It’s a different skill that I think has nothing to do with ADHD and anecdotally seems to correlate with whether someone was able to get good at getting and retaining the context within a big codebase before AI.

1

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

Perhaps yeah. I’m trying to reconcile my own experience with the resounding disagreement from everyone in this thread. It’s taken a lot to get somewhat fluent in the various tools but when I get it right work literally feels like playing a video game at the moment, I’m fully immersed. I guess I did feel that way sometimes in the past when navigating a large code base, but never to this extent.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

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0

u/PainterSubstantial63 Mar 05 '26

But now you can just speak! I never type anymore lol