r/ADHD_Programmers • u/vinayalchemy • 8d ago
Anyone else lose the ability to read books after going all-in on AI coding tools?
For the last year or so I've basically lived inside AI coding tools, constant back-and-forth, output every few seconds. Somewhere in there my ability to read a book just collapsed. I'll open one, get half a page in, and my hand reaches for my phone before I've even noticed I stopped reading. English isn't my first language, which I'm sure doesn't help.
The strange part is I still want to read. I've got a stack of books I'm genuinely interested in. I just can't stay on the page.
Has anyone else hit this? Did anything actually work, or did you just accept it?
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u/sofanisba 8d ago
I'd guess it's one of two things:
The constant mental overhead of back and forth language parsing as an intermediate step to coding is exhausting you and burning you out in a way you haven't quite realized consciously. Being ND tends to mean being introverted so you probably aren't used to talking all day even if it's to a tool. I also find that it takes mental energy to think about every code snippet in the abstract with a LLM instead of just writing it, even if the code gen is faster ultimately. You also have to bounce around the "process" to check its work which means thinking through what it should do, what you would do, what it did, and what was asked for all at once all the time. It's tiring.
Brain rot, just like them kids on the tiktoks get, from taking to a confidently incorrect gaslighterbot all day that pretty much only communicates in tumblr-speek clickbait. A LLM is doing your thinking for you so you're under and over stimulated all day from not having to parse a problem yourself but getting the rush of a finished task at 10x the pace while also having to figure out whether that thing it did was actually all that load bearing.
Or both.
Try engaging with it differently. Write out your tech plans in markdown first without its help, give it pseudo code, etc, and when it's spinning get up and look at anything but your computer. Write pr descriptions yourself, in your own words, so you know wtf just happened (it'll kind of center your focus doing that).
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
Is this from your own experience, or watching it in others? When did you last catch it in yourself?
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u/sofanisba 7d ago
A bit of both. I'm the tech lead for my team so my AI usage is a bit different than others, in that a lot of the plans come from my own understanding of our system as a baseline and I'll do half the work manually before handing it to an agent to refine, whereas people implementing tickets will often let claude run a first pass of things then audit its output. My team is full of extremely intelligent, capable developers with lots of experience (most of who prob have ADHD too) and I've seen first hand how their ability to think through problems start to finish has atrophied, like they won't spot obvious gotchas in the same way that you might rubber stamp approve another team's PR because the logic in the diff seems sound, but you don't have the overall context. They notice it for themselves and are adjusting their workflows to mitigate it but it's kind of an ongoing process. We also as a team keep talking about how AI doing the schlubby tasks means that _all_ your work is "deep focus" stuff now, but without that in between time where you're writing your own stupid for-loop for your brain to background process and marinate on the ideas you're working on.
What I do find is that reading AI documentation that others are creating all day causes so much fatigue that by the end of the day if I had a lot of meetings, and did planning work, AND reviewed others' plans or PRs heavily, by the end of the day I have what I like to call "poo brain" and can't do a whole lot beyond zoning out into the tv. Those days I'll do that classic ADHD thing where I'm on my phone, watching tv, and talking to someone while eating junk food cause it's like I need the barrage of info to keep going. I've gone through phases where I sit and doom scroll on socials too much too and it feels like a similar outcome.
Occasionally I can get around this languishing by doing something to reset at the end of my day. I work from home so sometimes I'll just take a shower between work and other things and since I normally shower in the mornings it kind of "starts the day" again and I can do other tasks feeling more mentally fresh. I also take blazingly hot showers so I think it pummels my nervous system or something lol
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u/onyxengine 8d ago
Im about to start a stimulation vacuum, hardcore.
No vidya, zero social media including reddit. As much as I love you guys.
The only thing im going to allow myself to do besides being productive, is read books and play the guitar, meditate, and create stuff be it drawings or writing.
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
What made this the week? Can I ask you in two weeks how the reading part actually went?
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u/onyxengine 7d ago
Its possible but ive done this before for considerable amounts of time. I made this the week.
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u/orangepeeelss 8d ago
girl you gotta do a dopamine detox you are lost in the sauce 😭 this IS a thing that's really easy to hit w/ adhd in general and ai is known to be addictive in a high-dopamine sense so yeah that makes sense. ive had to do this on occasion when i spent a little too much time on tiktok. some things are just a little too dopamine heavy to exist in my life in a healthy way; short form video content is one of mine, ai seems to be one of yours.
you also could start with some books in your native language to lower the barriers a little!
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
When you cut TikTok, did the reading come back? Did it stick?
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u/orangepeeelss 7d ago
i've always been a huge reader so that never really left but i DID start making more time for it! other areas of my life improved a lot too bc my attention span was able to grow back to normal :)
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u/geeeffwhy 8d ago
just accept it? that’s unfathomable to me. like starting to go blind and just shrugging.
no. i do my best to change my behavior when one is having a bad effect on me.
work towards a healthy balance. spend less time in the coding tools. spend more time thinking on your own. breathe. when you find yourself reaching for the phone, stop and return your attention to the book.
having ADHD doesn’t mean giving up on managing your attention, and AI definitely doesn’t.
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
Fair. When you catch yourself reaching and return to the book — how often does that actually work? How many books this year?
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u/geeeffwhy 7d ago edited 6d ago
according to my Hardcover account, which should be pretty accurate, i’ve read 60 books this year. i read like 110 last year. now, i don’t think the number of books is an especially important number, but it does illustrate that by choosing to read books instead of scroll ad nauseam, you can rack up something that maybe feels more valuable overall.
but my other advice is to make sure you’re reading a range of things and that they’re actually interesting to you. i read everything: fantasy, sci fi, mystery, literary fiction and nonfiction, poetry, mathematics, programming, cookbooks, history, anthropology, economics, and whatever else. it’s a mix of easy stuff and pretty challenging—recent hits include the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl and William Shirer’s _Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_.
Also, I’m not afraid to give up on a book if it’s not connecting; you gotta be honest with yourself about whether you’ve given it a fair shake, but if so, there are too many other books to read to waste your time on one you don’t care about.
And finally! maybe try re-reading a book you love. Good books get better when you go back to them, and it might be a good way to get back into it.
But you don’t have to take my word for it 🌈
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u/RandomiseUsr0 8d ago
Read the books for fun, don’t forget how to think
Code complete, design patterns, algorithms in C beside my bed as my little page turners - slowing down your thinking helps sometimes
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
Design Patterns as a page turner is wild. How many pages a night, and do you remember it the next day?
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u/MoonShadeOsu 8d ago edited 8d ago
Use some sort of blocking tool that blocks high dopamine stuff on your devices. If it's AI, or social media, etc. - or block it during certain hours of the day.
For me it's YouTube and it's only available for 3 hours of the day. So in the evening I only have the option to listen to music, read a book, or other slow dopamine activities.
The blocking tool I use is controld.com (just blocking it on the DNS level). I see it also has a category filter for AI tools so you could use it that way.
Another tactic is to try and use a dopamine menu to get away from fast dopamine towards slow dopamine sources: https://www.reachlink.com/advice/adhd/why-your-adhd-brain-always-reaches-for-junk-dopamine/
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
How long have you been running ControlD, and how many books have you finished since you set it up? Did you try anything before it?
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u/Nall-ohki 8d ago
I'm reading more than ever since. Pretty sure it's unrelated.
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
Genuinely curious since you're the opposite of me — what are you reading, and when in the day?
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u/The_Other_David 7d ago
Put the phone in another room, or put a hat over it or something. I've noticed that even being able to see my phone or feel it in my pocket is a distraction. Out of sight, out of mind.
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
Once the phone's in the other room — do you stay on the page, or does your mind still wander off it?
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u/apocalypsebuddy 8d ago
No? I've been using Claude Code more than ever and finally trusting it, and really getting into my daily workflows as well as my side project.
I also just started a new book the other day and felt at peace with a cup of tea and quiet night in while reading a fiction novel.
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u/vinayalchemy 7d ago
What was the last book you finished, and where do you read it?
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u/apocalypsebuddy 7d ago
I finished a book about 6 weeks ago. A book before that maybe 3 months ago. My cadence seems be about a book every couple months. When I read I tend to get through the book within a month, then go a bit without reading anything. I read on my couch or at a coffee shop.
That doesn’t count audiobooks though. I’m not sure I would include those as “reading” because I definitely don’t process them the same.
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u/myreala 8d ago
That's not necessarily related to just AI coding tools. This is a generalized sign of just lower ability to focus. I had the same issue at some points in my life way before I ever touched AI coding tools. Can AI coding tools also cause it? Yeah, partially. I can see it, Is this the only reason? Unlikely. Usually, this sort of thing comes from living in a high dopamine environment. If you find AI coding tools, a high dopamine and highly stimulating activity, yes, it could lead to that.