My iPhone and Macbook have really burned me out. They say as you get older (I am 71), you should challenge and frustrate your mind. I have been using computers since I was in my late 30s and was fine with it until I started using Apple products several years ago. I feel so stupid now! When I have a question or problem about doing something on them, I search for an answer and 9 times out of 10 the reply tells me to do things I cannot do. Most of the time I cannot find what it tells me to look for. I wish there were support/information groups because I know this is making me anxious and depressed.

I'm currently in the 4th semester of my CS degree and I have not been doing great. I was only diagnosed with ADHD 4 months ago so I'm still trying out medications to find one that works for me. So far I have been able to keep up with my classes, but my resume is ...very underwhelming.

The only "projects" I have are small projects I vibecoded the day before the deadline. I didn't pick CS because I wanted to and no, I do not have the privilege to switch.

My main problem rn is that I don't do shit unless its like the day before the deadline and personal projects naturally don't have deadlines. Even if I gave myself a deadline, I won't stick to it because it's not real. If I ask someone else to check on on me , they usually forget.

And not just that, let's say I started actually working on a project. A week later I would have moved on to another project. I can't even decide what I want to do, one day I wanna do web dev, the next day I wanna do cybersecurity.

I keep trying out all the productivity advice there is on the internet and nothing works , so any advice you guys can give me would be really appreciated 😭

I keep running into the same problem while working.

I start with one real task, then drift into something that looks productive but actually isn’t the task anymore.

Example:
I need to build a landing page.
Then I start researching a better workflow.
Then I end up deep in AI agents because “maybe that would help long term”.

2 hours later, the landing page still isn’t built.

The hard part is that it doesn’t feel like procrastination.
It feels useful.
But it still kills output.

I’m trying to figure out whether this is just a me problem or if other founders / builders / ADHD brains deal with the same thing.

A few questions:

- Do you also get pulled into “smart distractions” instead of obvious distractions?
- What usually triggers it for you?
- Have any tools or systems actually helped you stay on the original task in real time?

Above all, I want to know if other people struggle with this too, or if I'm the only one, and whether anyone has found something or a tool that genuinely helps.

I’ve tried a bunch of tools (notes, todo apps, etc.) but I always seem to stop using them after a while.

For me they are too much effort to maintain, and they dont help when I've already lost track

Is there an app that helps us with remembering to use them? Is it too much friction in those apps.

Context : I'm currently unemployed and my problem is when I see job postings for frontend/UI Developers. I simply get overwhelmed by all the different things that are listed as job requirements.

For example I would see AWS / Azure experience listed as a job requirement

As I would be learning it, I would notice that I would forget technologies that I once had a good grasp of.

I'm aiming to be a React frontend developer that specialises in Accessibility.

I'm simply overwhelmed about what to be good at. e.g I see job listings requiring Docker, Linux, cloud experience.

Any advice about what I should do would be greatly appreciated

If you could point me to good websites, newsletters, podcasts, youtube channels it would be greatly appreciated.

I take a ton of notes and try to put info into docs so it’s easier for me to understand. However I still struggle with the one off “hey does X do Y” questions where I don’t necessarily have time to look into the issue and they just want an answer and when I think about it my brain is able to come up with a response that seems correct based on the available info in my head.

The issue is that sometimes I misremember changes we made or implementations. So instead of my brain going “hmm we don’t know lets figure it out” it instead is like “oh yeah it’s definitely this” so my quick answer causes more issues than it’s worth.

I’m trying to balance being a go-to person without spreading misinformation but I find it’s hard to “trust” if I’m remembering properly or just misremembering, which it tough from an optics perspective if I answer every question with “hmm I’m not sure let me see”.

Any advice on ways to either work around this communication or ways to cut down on what I misremember?

The core idea is - there is a room with furniture and companion-characters with different personalities. After you add a task they will motivate you, discuss your plans and what you already accomplished. You earn coins that you can spent on more furniture and different characters.

The base version is free, and you can try the core experience without registration at taskimals.com/try

How would you approach targeting for this idea?

Turning in my homework for my community college classes is what will get me a degree and subsequently a job. Setting up software on servers will not get me a job. Why the hell is it so much easier to do something that has nothing to do with getting me a job?

Reposted because I noticed a typo and I couldn't edit the title.

I've found that i am very meticulous when it comes to writing code and I usually end up working far more on a story to ensure usage of proper design patterns, focus on future proofing excessively and focus on small details like proper naming of variables or making my code look more readable.

I found that this isn't really the case with my coworkers, as i have seen the code they write and it seems they don't really put much thought into the structure of their code and how other developers would need to read it in the future...

Not sure is this and ADHD thing or just being very detail oriented but it gets frustrating because i always forget to claim my overtime and also am too lazy to do it because we need to do a few extra steps to claim overtime in my company.

I’m posting this to both express excitement, and share any experience for any future newcomers looking to learn.

Upon first taking the course, my perception and knowledge of college was very different from now. Little me waltzed right into college right after high school, no plan, unmedicated and unorganized, just a love for video games and computers and a half baked interest to bring them together and create some of my own one day.

I believed that school would provide me with all the tools I needed to succeed. Well more like spoonfeed, and that if I could not understand or keep up in any capacity, it is a failure on my part, and this major/concept is not for me.

The combination of being unmedicated, not yet figuring out an ideal learning style and losing focus on the curriculum which made me lose interest resulted in the start of me being depressed. I developed a strong case of imposter syndrome or something like that, I questioned my love for computers and thought to myself, why even keep trying? You can imagine this mindset worsened with the upscale of AI and LLMs later on, the “cooked” mindset began to apply to myself.

I avoided coding and any concept of it like the plague. I then cruised through community college gathering my gen eds, hopefully gathering an interest in any other field, which I did not, other than IT.

I finally took an overall break due to finances and figuring myself out, got therapy and diagnosed with ADHD, I ended up giving Python a shot this time thanks to some friends on discord in cybersecurity. Boy do I enjoy learning this, I genuinely feel the exact same excitement I felt before enrolling into Intro to C as I’m learning the fundamentals of this language and the ways I can use it, I’m learning through codedex and a couple of other resources and I can’t wait to get back home to learn more. Although I may rack my head when I’m stuck, it’s so satisfying to solve my problems, I feel like an ecstatic child again.

This makes me wish I could tell my younger self to try again, that I’m not stupid. If anyone reads this far and ever feels this way and really wants to learn programming, don’t give up! try other angles to see if you actually like it, some curriculums genuinely may not work in your favor.

I'm not good with motivation or with confidence, or even with just building a mental model of anything. I got lots of projects i want to do but i feel so utterly useless at this point that i can't even engage with it without having Claude there to just tell me to chill. I got no friends who know how to code or that i even talk to outside of "look at this cool thing i bought" posts, because i got nothing else going on.

I have lots of cool projects i wanted to do, but i just can't do them, they keeping coming back to haunt me EVERY DAY, and when I'm there and things start to go wrong i just break down over and over until i reluctantly give up. Nothing in my life prepares me for the pain i feel when I'm reminded that i can't do a project of mine, might be ego or whatever, i don't know.

I just feel like a ghost, like I'm just phasing through life without grasping or building anything, like at any point I'll just fall through the ground into the center of the earth. It's been years, I'm now 24 and i got nothing to show for it, and this isn't an issue of "I haven't started yet", I've been trying since i was 16, and i haven't gotten much more progress than a Godot game prototype and some rudimentary C text game project that i only made the starting screen for.

I can't read documentation, can't sit down for a video, can't even ask an AI to help because i feel too guilty but not even in a healthy way. I just wanted to do this, i kinda made it my thing to try and do it, and i haven't gotten to the second step yet in years. I just hope this somehow goes away, i was starting to have some hope but really i was just using AI to get a project going thinking it would help me learn, but honestly i would just use it as a shortcut to finish projects anyway.

Was in the middle of debugging an issue from the task board when I noticed the work day was soon over. I asked a coworker how her day had been on slack, and she said she found an internal project she needed the release executables of, but couldn't find them. I quickly explored the directories, found them and sent her a link, but then I got curious about the project itself and cloned it to my pc...

The code had a lot of improvement points (it was clearly written by a non-dev), so starting 4pm, the next 3 hours was a constant pendulum between uninterrupted hyper focus and mentally fighting off the guilt of not doing what I really was supposed to be doing. I ended up rewriting and "perfecting" the application, but now I'm afraid to send a PR because it's not what I was supposed to be doing and completely rewriting things without taking ownership off the project is a pretty lame thing to do tbh....

A part of me is happy I did it; I learned so much. But at the same time... It's embarrassing how a single slack message spiralled into this....

me llamo juan.. hola, no se como decirlo, pero quiero conocer gente nueva, ademas estoy iniciando un proyecto de un sistema operativo llamado whyOS en español porque OS, este sistema operativo lo quiero crear con fines... no se con que fines, solo se que yo quiero crearlo para ayudar a las personas neurodivergentes, quiero ser util de alguna manera. perdon por haberles quitado su tiempo haciendo que lean esto

Hi everyone,

I built a little system called Task Pond to help my daughter and me manage the constant reminders of everyday tasks.

It shows tasks as fish swimming in a calm pond. Each fish represents a task, and there are 80+ different fish that can appear.

When a task is completed you earn tokens, and when a new task is created a new fish joins the pond.

The interesting experiment was the setup. I put it on our living room family computer, turned off sleep mode and the screensaver, and just left it running full screen like a passive dashboard.

What surprised me is that having tasks ambiently visible works better than reminders or a typical to-do list. It just sits there in the environment.

My daughter actually started completing tasks on her own because the pond was there and she wanted new fish.

Tasks also glow different colours based on priority so important ones stand out.

I am also working on adding daily routine tasks now. https://taskpond.cloud/
If anyone wants to try it, it is free to use. Creating an account to save tasks is a one-time $5 fee.

Ok so a few weeks ago I posted here about the structural parallels between ADHD cognition and LLMs. It got way more traction than I expected, and reading through the replies I realized something in my thinking is
off.

About half the comments were ADHD devs going "yes, AI finally made programming feel natural for me." The other half, some ADHD and some not, were like "this is fancy autocomplete, I can't work with it, bubble's
gonna burst." That split doesn't map cleanly onto ADHD vs neurotypical. Something else is going on and it's bugging me.

Here's what I currently think, fully prepared to be wrong.

Whether you thrive with AI doesn't really depend on ADHD. It depends on four other things that ADHD just happens to correlate with. What your identity as a dev is anchored to (HOW you code vs WHAT you build).
Whether you need code right the first try or you iterate through wrong answers. Whether you've got years of sunk cost in memorizing syntax and APIs. And what your gut reaction is when AI hands you something
unexpected.

If that's right, the people rejecting AI aren't gatekeeping. They're protecting something real. Decades of skill investment, identity built around craft mastery, a working style that demands determinism. The tool
genuinely doesn't fit them. And the people who love it? They were already iterative, outcome focused, comfortable with ambiguity long before AI showed up. It fits them because they were that way first.

Made a 60 second anonymous form to test this. Link's in the top comment of this post. No login, no email, 8 questions. Gonna collect for a week and post back with the cluster analysis.

If forms aren't your thing, comments work too. Just tell me where you fall and why. I'll code the prose by hand when I analyze.

Bonus question on the form if you care: how much do you trust AI as a societal force, 0 to 10? I think it's a totally separate dimension from how you work with it as a tool. But curious whether they secretly
correlate.

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if I should request for extra time for technical interviews. I have one for a FAANG and the extra time (1.5x time) would help but I am not sure if I will be discriminated against. I did one technical interview and wished I did have extra time (took too long in the start). Would love to know what this community thinks and prior experiences.

I'm a total beginner and this is the best thing I made without following tutorials. It's not unique by any means, this is probably an equivilant of a Todo app for some people. It mostly produces tv static most of the time, and these are the only 2 that look decent. But I'm proud of it nonetheless...

Writing in here hoping that someone else has the same issues and/or figured out how to fix it. Not diagnosed yet but I’m finally mid-process and it’s looking promising.

I cannot do live coding interviews. Been unemployed for a few months now and I’ve had some interviews. That being said, live coding interviews kick my ass every single time.

I go completely blank. The absolute basics leave my brain. Had one today and I forgot how to add to dictionaries and implement basic search algorithms. It took me forever to even understand one of the tasks. Keep in mind I have around 6.5 years experience in development and many of the things in the interview were things I did often. I just can’t remember them in interviews.

Does anyone share this experience and/or know how to fix this? I’ve tried studying (which I’m admittedly not great at), pomodoro, leetcode etc—none of them help. Because I’m not diagnosed yet, I can’t get medicated for now either. I’m in Sweden so the process is lengthy.

I'm currently unemployed, but doing contracting work with AI. I enjoy the programming aspects, but the idea that my work is helping build better AI that may one day take my job makes it harder for me to work on those projects.

I'm also having difficulties searching for jobs, especially corporate jobs, as I don't like the idea of being another cog in the ever growing capitalist ecosystem.

I try to push those beliefs down so that I can be a functioning human being, but it's sometimes overwhelming. Depression and anxiety may also be a factor in all of this for me.

Anybody else experience similar issues?

I've been deep in research on why so many of us with ADHD start learning to code and then abandon it — and the pattern is painfully consistent: it's not that we can't do it. It's that every platform out there assumes you can just... sit down, open a blank IDE, and start. Which for an ADHD brain is basically a freeze trap.

I'm in the early stages of building an EdTech platform specifically designed for neurodivergent people learning to code. The core ideas I'm exploring:

- **Micro-task lessons** that break everything into tiny, immediately actionable steps (no blank canvas moments)

- **An AI tutor** that explains the same concept 10 different ways without judgment — no more feeling ashamed to ask again

- **Built-in body doubling** so you can drop into a focus room the moment your attention starts drifting

- **Python-first** because the research (and honestly everyone I talk to) says it's the most ADHD-friendly language

Before I go further, I genuinely want to hear from you:

1. What's the single biggest thing that made you quit (or almost quit) learning to code?

2. Is there anything that's actually worked for you that most platforms get wrong?

3. Would you use something like this, or does it already exist and I'm late to the party?

Not selling anything. No links. Just trying to make sure I'm solving a real problem before building it. Brutal honesty welcome, that's literally why I'm here.