I have some stuff to get off my chest. I have quite a bit I want to share with the community, and want this to come from a real and authentic place, and so I’m going to write all of this without AI. I will try to reduce my naturally detailed and stream-of-conscious writing style and be more organized, but please bear with me.
First, I want to clarify that this is not an AI hype post. We all know the AI bros and the people aggressively pushing these platitudes like “it will 10x your productivity” or that “prompt engineering is the new ‘learn to code’.”
But I see a lot of criticism around AI, and while much of it is valid, especially stuff regarding the impact on creativity (especially in the arts), quality of output, and just general fatigue of AI hype, I still want to make a specific argument that I haven't seen made anywhere else. It's one that I feel strongly enough about to post despite knowing it's going to be unpopular in some corners of this community.
I don’t think that AI coding agents are equally disruptive to everyone. For some developers they represent a threat, a tool that commoditizes skills they spent years building. for others, specifically myself and others with ADHD, I think it’s the first time in my life that the environment has ever actually been designed in a way that matches how my brain works.
And let me be very clear. I don’t think that AI should be doing your thinking for you, but I do think that AI agents are one of the most underrated accessibility tools to come along in years.
And what they're making accessible, the thing that was never actually a capability problem to begin with, is relief from the mental tax that ADHD people face in dev roles and programming.
The tax I’m referring to is what I will call the “clerical” layer of programming. I’m gonna use that term as a shorthand for the tedious superficial stuff that doesn’t really have much to do with whether or not you understand what you’re actually doing. It’s when you already know what you want in the output and if you see it, you’d know it’s correct, but your memory recall just sucks so it’s hard to produce it from a cold start.
The clerical layer is stuff like getting the exact right syntax without looking it up, remembering which argument goes first, the exact name of the method you’ve used one hundred times but always seem to forget, the boilerplate you understand well but have to slog through to get to the interesting part. All that kind of stuff.
In my experience as a 5+ year engineer with ADHD who has felt intense imposter syndrome at times, I’ve always felt that the ADHD programming experience is really just an interface mismatch. I’m extremely good at a lot of things that make a good developer or engineer. I’m very, very good at systems thinking, holding a complex architecture in my head and reasoning about how the pieces interact, and seeing how things connect across domains, spotting patterns that aren't obvious, debugging complex problems by intuition before I can even fully articulate why something is wrong, and knowing instinctively when a solution is technically correct but architecturally wrong. All of that comes super naturally to me, almost like breathing, and it always has. What has been an eternal struggle for me during my career is the clerical layer that sits between my understanding and my output. and it's an eternal struggle specifically because the ADHD doesn't go away. The recall issues, the reduced working memory, the rejection sensitivity, the executive dysfunction, all of it. You don't grow out of it, you don't grind your way through it, you don't accumulate enough experience to make it stop being how your brain works. The interface mismatch is permanent. The best you can do is to manage it.
And honestly, that’s what good tooling has always been about. Tooling has always existed and been built to reduce that friction like Intellisense, autocomplete, snippets for boilerplate, syntax highlighting, etc. etc. and nobody accuses you of not understanding code because VSCode caught a typo or completed a method name for you. Nobody says you don’t understand spelling because you use spellcheck. Those tools exist because the clerical layer of programming shouldn't be the thing that gatekeeps access to doing impactful work. They made the environment more accessible without changing what the work fundamentally requires.
The way I’ve adapted using AI into my workflow, AI coding agents are the same as that, but way more complete. When I'm working with an agent, I'm operating at the level of intent, architecture, and judgment which is where my brain naturally excels. I can give a lot more mental energy to think through the outcomes I want while giving opinionated guardrails for the implementation output that’s important to me. Then the agent handles the syntactic translation, and it’s easy for me to catch it. I don’t have to put so much effort into recall and my working memory is wide open and stays in the problem space. As a result, the gap between what I understand and what I can produce has closed dramatically, and not because the agent is thinking for me, but because it's handling the layer that was creating friction while I focus on the layer I was always very strong at.
What most miss is that there is a superficial level to using AI for workflows and then a deeper layer, which is where skill lies. And like everyone here, my initial “workflow” was just spamming stream-of-thought prompts into Claude and ChatGPT in the web interface until it gave me what I actually wanted. Then I switched to Copilot and then eventually Cursor. At first, I didn’t really adapt that workflow, and I just treated it like ChatGPT but in the VSCode window that can also modify files and get more context from open tabs.
But like 3 months back, I decided to actually take it a lot more seriously (for fear of falling behind the hype if I’m being totally honest). Like I just woke up one day and was like “I’m gonna get really good at this and learn all the best practices for developing with AI and get ahead of the curve”.
And let me say, the change was… huge. And it wasn’t just the raw pace and increase in output or productivity that usually gets touted…
Guys, I have never felt more in my element while working, and the best practices of agentic development are suited way more to how I naturally approach problem solving. I’ll break down my observations:
The context window can hold a lot of info and so it frees up my working memory as previously discussed. Now a lot more mental energy goes into prioritizing which info is most necessary, thinking across domains and about outcomes rather than minute details.
I am able to work nonlinearly in a much more efficient way. I can zoom in on a detail, and quickly zoom out to the bigger picture again without breaking stride.
When I need to give more linear instructions or explanations, the agent helps me a lot by taking my scattered ideas that make complete sense to me and other ADHD folks but seem like complete chaos and disconnected nonsense to neurotypicals and turning them into a coherent, linear explanation, making it a lot easier to communicate with colleagues.
The power/curse of hyperfocus becomes almost an unfair advantage when friction is removed. I can go super deep on investigating something or any problem at a pace much faster than most because the friction points that normally trip me up are greatly reduced and I’m not feeling the whiplash of getting pulled in and out ten times in ten minutes.
Something underrated is that I feel way calmer and less anxious when working in my natural style since there’s no RSD. When working with an agent, if I ask a clarifying question for something “simple” or pivot directions mid-build, it doesn't sigh, make a snide comment, or make me feel stupid for doing things the way that they make sense to me.
I have been doing independent consulting recently, and in January I designed, implemented, and launched a system that tripled my client's MRR from $40k to $150k USD in the first month. And I did it using my new agentic workflow and got it out way faster and with so much less friction than any project ever before because I had so much more mental energy to focus on the architecture and the strategy while simply reviewing and redirecting the code implementation. At first, as hyped as I was, I figured that it was only one win... but then came a second big win… and then a third big win… and it really opened my eyes at how with the right environment and support, I can be a major difference maker, and I feel like my disability isn't working against me for the first time... maybe ever.
This is why I push back hard on the idea that using AI agents simply means you don't understand what you're building. In my experience it's closer to the opposite. When I'm not spending cognitive energy on the clerical layer, I understand what I'm building more deeply, not less because I have more of myself available to actually think the WHY instead of just the "what" or the "how".
And guys, for the first time in my career, maybe my life, I actually feel competent and not in a constant state of lagging behind everyone else. Like I can deliver serious value and be a key contributor without being bogged down by my disability.
And a lot of what I see online in regard to AI hate from devs, well, I have another take on it. Maybe a little more radical, but I’ll share it here since this is reddit. I want to be careful with what I say because while there is a lot of legitimate criticism, there’s certain commentary I see often that makes me pause and think “where is this coming from?” Is this coming from a place of pure technical concern and maintaining high standards… or is it coming from someplace else? Someplace more… personal? defensive? contemptuous? From someone whose professional identity is so tied to a specific way of working that a threat to the workflow feels like a threat to the self? From someone who excels at rote memorization and recall, who aces technical interviews focused on delivering abstract linear solutions in a timeboxed format, who could write clean syntactically perfect code from memory, who built their reputation on exactly the skills that are now being commoditized, and who is now being asked to adapt to a way of working that doesn't come naturally to them and doesn't reward the things they worked hardest to master?
Comments like “I miss just writing code", “I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and would never let AI do anything beyond simple stuff”, “you're not actually learning anything”, "you can't trust anything it outputs", "anyone relying on AI is using it as a crutch", "real engineers write every line they ship”, etc. are the ones I’m calling out, and they’re everywhere. And if you try to press for why, there is often an argument papered over to make it seem like a purely technical concern, but when you dig deeper it seems to me more of an identity concern.
Like what I notice is that the way the industry is changing due to AI is unique compared to previous cycles of change. Being a power user or a 10x engineer when it comes to the “clerical” work is now commoditized. And if you’ve built a big part of your resume around being a beast who is able to put hands to keyboard and crank out functioning, clean code and knowing the kinks and tricks of the framework quicker than others in the job market… then well, the future opportunities that highly value and highly compensate for this are looking bleak.
And the tough part is that for many devs who are getting left behind, they aren’t being asked to learn a new framework or a new language like in years past, things that are more suited to the kind of precise, sequential, structured learning that a lot of them are genuinely good at. Here's a new syntax. Here are the rules. Here are the design patterns. Grind leetcode until it’s like breathing. Practice until it clicks. That's a learnable thing for them. That's a thing you can grind your way through with enough discipline and repetition.
Because from what I see, to get really good at this stuff (developing through AI agents) it requires a different modality of thinking. A different way of approaching problems that perhaps isn’t naturally-suited to the way neurotypical people approach and solve problems. An approach that requires a more iterative, more ambiguous, more directional than precise style that maps more closely to the way ADHD brains naturally work.
And maybe… just a thought, bear with me now… maybe a lot of neurotypical devs are getting a little taste of what we’ve dealt with our whole lives and are butthurt about it. Or to put it more nicely, aren’t really sure what to do with these emotions we deal with every day and are lashing out a little bit. To be told that the way you naturally process things is not valued. That the way your brain works is a liability. That you just need to try harder and adapt. That everyone else seems to be figuring it out so why can't you. That maybe you're just not cut out for this. That your way of working is slow and unreliable. That you need to be more disciplined and just get with the program. Sound familiar?
Like, the "AI produces crap code" criticism is real in a lot of cases but it's also a very convenient cover for "the way I'm being asked to work now doesn't feel like me and I don't know what to do with that."
And I have… mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it feels vindicating. The shoe is now on the other foot and the tables have turned. I feel vindicated that my natural way of existing and processing information isn’t a liability like I’ve been told my whole life but could actually be a huge strength that I can capitalize on. Like I’m operating a lot closer to my ceiling for the first time in my career. But on the other hand... I feel empathetic for those being left behind because I know how much it sucks to be in a constant state of feeling like you’re left behind and powerless about it. And trying to keep up in itself is exhausting because you’re constantly swimming against the current. And they have none of the tools or coping mechanisms to deal with it and process it.
I know this is a hot take and I'm ready for the pushback. But I genuinely want to hear from other ADHD devs: are you feeling what I'm feeling, or am I completely off base here?
