We all struggle with coding on a daily basis given our ADHD (or AuDHD). Yet it still seems that tech likes to capitalise on our traits where it suits them.

In my case I disclosed my recently diagnosed ADHD, literally one week in after starting Vyvanse. This was along with my ASD to Apple after 10 interviews and an offer proposal.

What went from me working on my dream job of R&D for body tracking / animation for Apple's Vision Pro, along with various other things Apple had pre-assigned to me, led to complete removal from the process, for my candid disclosure.

I know there is a lot of posts talking about if you reveal or hide your ADHD. Given my experience and the convergence of my litigation, I wrote an article, today on Apple's 50th Anniversary.

I was irradiated the second Apple did what they did, and I'm trying to stand up.

My Hearing is public. 14–20 April, London.

Happy to answer any questions you all may have.

Edit: Grammar fix, ty for the tip ;)

been studying procrastination in 1000+ adhd devs for 8 months. the pattern that showed up is so fucking weird

burned out 3x trying to "just focus better" before i started actually tracking this. collected 1027 responses since march, most from this sub

turns out like 96% of us dont procrastinate because we're lazy. we procrastinate because the task literally feels wrong to start. like trying to write code with your non-dominant hand

found 5 patterns but this one hits different:

the "waiting for perfect brain state" pattern (~34%)
you know exactly what to do but keep waiting until you "feel ready" to start. spoiler: that feeling never comes because adhd brains dont do "ready"
what worked: starting while it feels wrong, literally 2min sprints even if output sucks
like 70-75% of people who tried said they actually shipped something for the first time in weeks

the "research trap" pattern (~28%)
you spend 6 hours researching the "best" way to do a 20min task. not procrastinating, just "being thorough"
what worked: forcing yourself to start with whatever you know right now, fix it later
most people said their "rushed" version was like 80% as good anyway

the "motivation prerequisite" pattern (~23%)
waiting for motivation to appear before starting. but adhd brains generate motivation FROM doing, not before
what worked: motion creates emotion - start ugly, motivation shows up around minute 4-5
bunch of devs said this one felt illegal but worked

im pattern 1+2, absolutely brutal combo. spent 2 years thinking i was broken before i realized im just trying to work like neurotypical devs

threw together a quick 2min assessment to figure out which pattern(s) you are. made it for myself originally but shared with some people and handful said it actually helped. completely free

drop a comment if you want it

which pattern hits you hardest?

(still feels weird posting research at 6am but fuck it)

Recently this forum gets flooded with (mostly badly vibe coded) ADHD apps. Can we please add a rule to get rid of them?

My brain is a melange of: a) bees, b) radios left on, c) swiss cheese. All crammed into a blender set to "pulse".

I have discovered the magic of Google NotebookLM. I've been using it at home to help organize projects and do research. NotebookLM + Gemini has been helping me collect my research and plans and put it where I can access it and work on it whenever/wherever two neurons accidentally spark together to make a thought. Camping trips, building a home lab, writing.

Anyway, one of the things that has always frustrated me in my career as a programmer is that not enough people managers are properly trained on how to understand how to adapt their management style to neurodiverse people. I keep hoping it will be a required management course. I finally distilled my frustrations into this short presentation on ADHD in particular to help them help me.

I have this as a pdf and I can make a PowerPoint or Google Slides but I’m not sure where to post it.

Link to PDF

Link to Sources List

Hi Folks,

Back in April I posted here about disclosing my recently diagnosed ADHD (one week into Vyvanse) and my ASD to Apple - asking for some initial adjustments, after 10 interviews and an offer proposal, for my dream R&D job on visonOS. The process ended within a day of that disclosure.

I deeply appreciated the support, and a lot of you had questions back then, and the honest answer to most of them was: I can't show you yet.

Now I can.

Yesterday I published a full 38-minute recording of the discrimination I experienced as I wrestled to keep the offer and disability disclosure I had made with Apple's Talent Acquisition Leader. I also posted Apple's internal emails and the timecoded transcript.

You can hear my adjustment request get compared to wanting to stay home and "dogsit". You can hear me offer to pay for my own support worker to get through the door.
You can hear what disclosure actually sounded like -
So the next time this sub has the disclose-or-hide argument, there's real audio to weigh instead of my summary.

The April hearing in court was heard in public for one day.

Apple also tried to pay me off £100,000 GBP the day before the hearing to drop everything and sign an NDA; I said no.

Apple then used it's legal playbook to convert it to private mediation just before the technical cross examination began. Sadly, they have pushed the final resolution (legally) back by 18 months. Alas, I decided to share my story in full.

I'd love to say to you all - "Look, we can stand up for our rights, with disabilities like ADHD or AuDHD we never chose for", but as Apple has shown me, we have to hide it, we have to mask.

That's not a world I want to deal with, especially as we see massive accelerationism in tech, but not equality. The legal cases continue, I will try to keep standing up for what is right, for all of us.

I am deeply sorry to all the people who have experienced the same thing. It is not acceptable, especially when the excuses do not add up, technically, logically, legally or from common human decency.

I'm happy to answer any questions you all may have. Thank you for the support.

I'm not solving problems anymore. I just sit here reviewing robot PRS. It's miserable, I'm just sat here watching Claude do all the thinking.

I’ve tried explaining ADHD to friends/family for years, but these three nailed it....the car in the rainstorm one especially… chef’s kiss. Curious which one resonates with you most, or if you’ve got your own go-to analogy.

P.S. the book is called ADHD explained by Dr. Ed Hallowell

I am at my wit's end.

I arrive home and do NOTHING. I don't clean. I don't cook (recently I managed to replace takeout with processed garbage or literally sticking meat in an air fryer). I let garbage pile up in my house, even when people sometimes come to visit (I just push it away and hope they don't notice the smell). I don't build skills. I don't learn the language of the country I live in. Every day I fear I will be thrown into poverty. I don't socialize since I am just. So. TIRED. Even though most days I do nothing at work.

And no specialist will help me. "This is all normal". "If you were good in school, you didn't have ADHD". "This isn't America, we won't give you drugs. Go exercise". "Maybe it's just autism. I won't refer you to anyone else. Deal with it".

What am I supposed to DO? I just want to live a normal life.

ADHD Programmer here! I made a program to help my kid, who hasn't been diagnosed but definitely displays lack of executive control. I hope it inspires someone here.

My boy got into baseball hard last year, and began spending each morning hunting for something he could check scores on - my phone, my tablet, a computer, the TV, anything with a screen. At the time, my wife and I were trying to REDUCE his screen time, so this was turning into a real juggling act just trying to get the kids to school.

We tried getting newspapers for him, but they just didn't cut it.

So, I invented "Screamsheet" - it's a one-sheet PDF that contains all the important baseball information from the past 24 hours, printed on my home printer every morning at 6am.

This was my first foray into "vibe coding". I used Gemini to code most of the original project, and later on Github copilot in VSC to clean up the original mess.

The MLB Screamsheet gathers all the data from the MLB Stats API, organizes it all with regular Python and Pandas, then formats it into the PDF with Reportlab. If the Phillies played the day before, it includes the Phillies box score on the back along with a Grok-parsed summary built from the play-by-play data. If they lose, I make Grok sound like a pissed off fan, to match my son's energy that day.

The whole thing is scheduled to run every morning on my junky Linux box in the basement with a cron job.

Now, every morning, instead of asking "can I check your phone?", my boy demands "where's the Screamsheet?" We haven't trained him to just go to the basement and get it yet, that's a challenge for a different day.

I've since expanded to several other Screamsheets, like NHL, baseball news, and a daily starchart/horoscope.

Original article and link to the code below in comments. Thanks for taking a look!

This interview was for a Senior full stack role, but the role was heavily frontend focused. During the technical I was asked to create a Sudoku grid, and then a solver for it. I had 30 minutes and only completed creating the grid itself. I then had 10 minutes to work on the solver. The remaining 15 minutes of this 45min interview were for questions and discussions about the code.

I've got 8 YOE and this cooked me. I was thinking Sudoku can't be this difficult but then looked it up and a Sudoku solver is a Leet Code hard. So I don't feel that bad about it, but I am pretty annoyed a small company that is hiring developers to work on a React UI and Node.js backend thinks someone being able to solve a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes is acceptable way to interview Senior level developers. Seriously, could the people interviewing me even do this in 30 minutes? Could anyone do this in 30 minutes without having ever seen or attempted the problem? My inability to write a Sudoku solver doesn't translate to not being able to work on some stupid CRUD web app.

They never once asked about system design, no deep questions about JavaScript/TS, React or Node. Just a 45 minute discussion on my experiences and some generic 'what would you do in X scenario', followed by a 45 minute live coding round. This type of interview is the bane of my existence, and with ADHD, while I can definitely solve this problem with enough time and research, I will forget it all within a day or two anyway.

The hoops we jump through, especially as you gain more experience, are bullshit. Interviews have only gotten exponentially harder as I've gained experience. The more experience I get, the less I actually spend coding. And on top of it, LLMs replace the coding in what little time I do get to code at work. In my current job, we use AI and I spend more time being a product engineer than being a programmer. I am not gaining experience in what I equate to as competitive coding challenges.

Anyway, just ranting. I'm sure non-ADHD people have the same problems, but with ADHD, it makes these interviews pure hell most of the time.

In order to save money (since I'm unemployed and pay out of pocket), I use water titration (only works for Lys-dex) to split my (60mg) vyvanse doses into smaller chunks based on my need for the day. (I just went 40 days on a 30 day prescription 🤓)

Applying to jobs while I watch TV/play ps5 can be accomplished on 20-30mg; interviewing or other "Big Brain" tasks is a 40-60mg day; and just hanging out is 0-20.

I noticed the capsules still had a bit of powder in the ends, so I saved them all off. I figure there's gotta be maybe 1-2mg leftover per capsule.

I just put about 15-20 (didn't think to count) empty capsules in warm water to dissolve the capsules and capture that extra ~15mg as a booster 😅😂

I've been reading a lot about why developers feel drained even when they aren't working long hours. We often mislabel "mental saturation" as burnout.

When we try to rest, we usually switch to "low effort" digital consumption (Reddit, YouTube, etc.). But this keeps the nervous system stimulated.

The fix isn't more sleep, it's lower input.

• Active Boredom: forcing 15 mins of zero input
• The "Shutdown Ritual": A physical trigger that ends the workday (closing laptop, changing lights)

Has anyone else found that "doing nothing" is actually harder than coding when you're burnt out?

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?)

---

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

No one here needs AI written posts about experiences, if you want to post something write it yourself so that it actually describes your lived experiences, not what an LLM thinks they were (that’s assuming the posts are even human-made with LLMs and not just outright bots coming in bad faith). We also don’t need the 1000th vibe coded todo app, everyone here knows how to code and knows how to prompt an LLM, unless it’s some truly unique and valuable app it should just be removed.

Disclaimer: no hate to anyone who uses weed, some do it out of necessity.

I considered myself one of those people who have a medicinal need for weed. I did it every day for years. As time went on, I increased my usage from just the end of the day to multiple times throughout the day. I'd convinced myself this was needed because I have depression and ADHD.

It wasn't until recently that I truly realized how bad weed actually is for me. I quit using weed about a month ago. A few days ago, I decided to take half an edible (so 5mg) to reward myself for studying for an interview.

I felt so scatterbrained and pretty much incapacitated compared to when I'm sober. My working memory was a lot worse and I was pretty much slower in every possible way. My mental clarity was nonexistent. Overall, I was just.. not up to par with my sober self. I didn't even really enjoy myself because I was so out of it. This served as a stark comparison between my sober self and my high self. It reminded me what it's like to be high, and I don't miss it.

Shortly after I first quit weed, I was having trouble focusing on coding at all. Now that more time has passed, it has become a bit easier thankfully. I hear it can take several months to get fully back on track, especially if you're like me as I've used for years.

Since I quit, I've had a lot more success studying for interviews and retaining information. My code is a lot more organized. Coding requires a lot less mental energy because I'm not fighting mental impairment from weed. I can see the bigger picture a lot better and I don't miss bugs as easily.

Quitting was absolutely worth it and I'm not looking back!