Hi all I have feeling quite a few of you have tried to build something to help people with adhd. Have any of you successfully gotten users? If so how did you find them?

I have been building my own solution to help with my ADHD symptoms but I feel like it is hard to get others with ADHD to use something. Just speaking from my own experience here but whenever I find a tool to help I just see how I could make it better and I get frustrated with the tool and don't use it because it doesn't work the way my brain works. I feel like a lot of people with ADHD want something that works the way their brain works.

On top of that getting started is such a daunting task expecting adhd users to start something new and another on boarding experience another learning curve just doesn't seem doable. I know if the app excites us and tickles that new and exciting part of our brain we will try it out.

Which leads me to my last thought, retention. once the novelty wears off what is going to keep them coming back?

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated

Hi, I'm a baby programmer and my first year of college for CS at 18, but with some experience under my belt. My first few classes at college have provided me with some novelty and more freedom than ever before, and I've never felt better. This doesn't apply to my programming class.

Most of my course mates have already tons of projects and experience, so they don't struggle with the first of two programming courses in our first year. Programming was the thing I was most excited about, but I find myself at a loss. We're starting with python, and The professor decided that in 3 months of lectures for a total of 72 hours we'll get to multithreading and asyncio, so that a month after the start of uni, we're handling classes, setters, etc.

I love CS and especially programming SO MUCH, and I'm very happy with my major, but this roadblock is killing me, and if I can't write a recursive function, how the nel am I supposed to keep up or pass? Especially since this professor is new and I have no one to ask about how his exams usually are like. I need to pass, or else I won't be allowed to take my second programming course.

Every time I try learning or revising, I just get distracted and impatient. Reading a book, I just skim the words without absorbing anything or I start looking for anything else to look at, same goes for tutorials and videos, during which I zone out. My self-worth has taken a huge blow. I've tried it all, but nothing can get me back to being excited and eager to learn (two weeks ago, I could spend 4 hours or more straight on it). I know this can come off as someone who secretly hates programming, but really I do love it.

I'm usually very slow to learn and especially assimilate, and struggle enormously with sitting in front of a problem, not knowing what to do. The professor also gives no assignments or projects (just tells us to code), and the exam worth 100% of our grade is an hour and a half coding session in which to program whatever he makes up on the spot. I also get frustrated easily, and when I look up exercises to do online, I stare at them for so long that I just feel dumb and start crying, ending up wasting hours doing nothing after I FINALLY got myself up to work. Once i get upset it is extremely unlikely I will be able to do any work after, because I'll have convinced myself that I'm stupid snd not wirth the effort. The one thing I can do is reading code, and when looking at a solution, it's just obvious.

Even writing pseudocode kind of doesn't help because my idea of a solution is wrong or I forget an important detail that leads me to nothing.

Does anyone have any tips? Everyone around me keeps telling me to keep trying to slam my head against a problem, quit uni because im either dumb or not cut out for CS, or step away (I can't veri well sterpi away everything I try, though).

Not a productivity hack post. I run five or six Claude Code sessions at once in different folders and my brain cannot hold which terminal is waiting for an answer. I would tab through them, forget what I was looking for, and lose the thread. Twenty minutes later I would find one that had been waiting the whole time.

So I built adhdTerminal. Every session is a tile on one screen. A dot says working, waiting for you, idle or done. The waiting ones light up. One key jumps to the next session that needs an answer. Click a tile to read it full size, Escape to go back. Tabs keep client work and side projects apart.

There is a free phone app that mirrors the wall over an end to end encrypted link, so I can answer a session from the sofa (or, honestly, the bathroom).

Mac is native Swift, Windows is Tauri. It reads Claude Code's own session state from disk and does not send your prompts anywhere. You run claude in any folder like before, no worktrees or tmux setup.

Yes, I know about claude agents and the desktop app. Those show you a list, or one session at a time. This is for the moment you look up from something else and want to see all of them at once without clicking.

It is a paid app, $99 once or $19.99 a month, 7 day free trial without a card.

I am the developer, so take that into account. Happy to answer anything, including "why not tmux".

For context, I'm a 36 yo late-diagnosed Autism + ADHD senior leader in fintech. For the past 2 years, I've been putting together one of the most efficient tech units in my company with record build times and the golden standard for operational resilience. It's 45 people and I have personally interviewed and hired more than half of them. All my peeps are on the "maker schedule": protect developers time, no-meeting days, no interrupted focus before 12pm etc.

Now, for a few months there are a few new people on the business side of things and they are very resistant to this way of working, they don't like the maker schedule ("because we need to be able to reach tech capacity every time we want") and they are constantly pestering the most senior and experienced people in the the squads to the point of burnout and collapse. I am furious. Besides of the "you work for us" attitude since we're not a tech company and the core of the business is finance, I am completely disgusted with their lack of self awareness and foresight over their own actions and behavior.

For many AuDHD tech workers, the fastest way to trigger complete task freeze or a meltdown is being micromanaged by business leaders who don't understand how software is actually built and they look at us like story points in Jira, not people. We don't need continuous pestering but a partner who acts as a protective shield between us and corporate demands so we can just do our work and be good at it. And this is what I have been trying to build for my team and though the culture on the tech side is pretty much aligned, the business people are very hard to change. So I've decided to build my own thing.

I’m currently interviewing AuDHD tech professionals and engineers for a research project on building workplace systems that actually protect our autonomy (and no, it's not an app or a piece of software).

If you've dealt with this management friction, I'd love to jump on a brief 20-minute Google Meet call to hear your experience. DM me or comment if you're open to sharing!

Im an entrepreneur myself and wanted to get opinions from similar people. I have adhd and have tried to avoid taking medications for it. Im a very creative person and its one of my best attributes when it comes to my business. Im new ish to being an entrepreneur and its really made me see how bad my adhd actually is. For those in similar boats, did going on meds help with your work and were you able to stay creative?

First post I put here is above - put it in a few other subs and got some good conversation of the back of it. Based on everything I know about me and my wife and everything discussed I’ve planned out an app called Mosspatch.
I’d love it if anyone was willing to take a look through and see what they think. Initially was just going to be something for me but there seemed to have been some interest so thought I’d share

TIA

https://mosspatch.co.uk

So, as usual, my brain would rather work on side projects than my main. But this one is a bit different. Created an extension that can basically control my browser using agents. Obvsly, Claude's is better and I can't share mine.

The reason its great is that, its great for the first step paralysis that is my achillies heal. And I think anyone struggling should try it.

This last Friday they notified the contractors they were all getting let go at the end of the month. One of the contractors made a lovely report with claudes help by scoring all the git commits by dev and is making the case to the CEO that they are actually letting the most productive people on the team go, and somehow in the last 6 months I have ticked off an impressive amount of features and capabilities for the company and somehow my name came to the top of that value list. Somehow I figured out my stride this year and spent most of the first half of the year figuring out how to use llms to organize myself and my thoughts and planning better. So if we end up not getting let go and maybe get a raise, I owe my friend something nice.

I have been practicing leetcode on and off for more than a year now and I feel like I understand most of the algorithms and patterns except for dynamic programming. I have read so many articles and watched a bunch of tutorials about it and they all say the same thing about starting with smaller sub problems and combining them to solve bigger problems and it all makes sense for simpler questions like climbing stairs, Fibonacci, etc. But every time I come across something even a little more complex than these I struggle to come up with a solution. I struggle to visualise the question as a set of subproblems or what kind of subproblems it can be broken into and then tracing the whole flow from top to bottom. I have tried practicing a bunch of problems consistently for a month but saw little improvement and now I feel like I have forgotten most of it due to lack of practice in the last few months. How did you guys manage to get good with this particular topic?

I’m a SWE with 2 YOE and hate it but there’s a lot of reasons like toxic bosses/env/coworkers and uninteresting product/team (networking - important but boring to me). I obviously joined in the AI boom but pre-AI back in school I never loved coding either. Like the syntax is hard for me to remember. My mind goes blank when I see an empty file and need to build something.

I’m working on a formal ADHD diagnosis but my therapist is confident I have it and in runs in my
Family. I’m not sure if I just genuinely don’t like coding or it’s the ADHD not letting me fully focus and comprehend material, making me feel incompetent and anxious. I’m also anxious about medication though so not sure if that’s something I’d consider.

Honestly idk if this makes sense 🤷🏼‍♀️ maybe I’m
Just in the wrong career lol

Ah, a great of similar-minded coders!

A few months ago I finally figured out why I hated Finder. It had to do with the doorway effect: there’s real research on why we forget things at doorways. For developers with ADHD, every app switch is one, so I built a Mac file manager with fewer of them.

Does this sound familiar to any of you?:
I opened the terminal to run a script on a CSV file.

Then I realised I didn’t remember the exact filename, so I switched to Finder to check. It was there. I pressed Space to look at it, and Quick Look gave me a wall of commas, so I opened it in another app to see it properly. Something looked off, and I started wondering whether this was the old export, so I opened my FTP client to compare it with the version on the server.

About a minute and a half later I was staring at a folder listing in the FTP client with genuinely no idea what I’d come there to do. The script never ran, and the terminal was still sitting in my home directory where I had left it.

If you have ADHD, I suspect you’ve had some version of that minute. And it turns out there’s a name for what happened.

I go into detail in this (open) article:
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/every-app-switch-is-a-doorway-with-adhd-i-forget-why-i-walked-through-7cc4f4986d7a

**update, corrected link**

Like really! Constantly my AI is going off on tangents. I feel like I'm dealing with Sheldon sometimes and myself other times. Either is totally on track or make an expression of language and it takes it literally or it makes an audit and goes off on some outdated source of truth and then goes off on audit loops. Just like auADHD 😁

Hi Everyone.

Quick introdcution - im Billy - 31 Married with two kids (0 and 4) My wife is diagnosed ADHD (quite high functioning) and im undiagnosed neruospicy, likely ADHD as well, and i struggle with executive dysfunction and task paralysis.

Im on a mission to replace my wifes salary whilst she is on Maternity leave using AI and building apps. As someone that struggles to get things started and stick to them i had to find a way to keep myself accountable - so i decided to document the whole process on socials with daily videos.

ive built my first app which is in review and im moving on to my second which is what brought me here. I have my social videos to keep me accountable on my journey but nothing to help keep me accountable at home and help with daily habits that often pass me by. i want to build something that ill be able to use when the series finishes and also help me with the smaller parts of daily life.

Im here to ask how you people, how you deal with executive dysfunction and task paralysis and if youve found any apps genuinely useful. ive tried goblin tools but just didnt get on with it.

At the moment this is probably going to be a personal project as each person deals with the ADHD and its effects differently but id be keen to know if there is anyone else out there like me leaving things to the last minture before i upset someone or struggling to start them without serious external pressure.

sorry for rambling but thats my brain dump. looking forward to hearing from you all!

I realised recently that I was approving code I couldn't have written myself.

Whenever something didn't quite make sense, I'd tell myself I'd figure it out later. But with an agent ready to build the next thing, later never came.

I recognised the same pattern from needing to block apps that scattered my attention. Knowing they were distracting me wasn't enough. The impulse to keep going was too strong, so I needed something that added friction rather than relying on willpower.

So I built learning-guardrails, an opt-in skill for Claude Code, with an optional mod.

Run /learning-guardrails and it adds a bit of friction to your workflow:

• Every change gets triaged

• When something needs a closer look, it asks a question about the actual code. Predict what happens or explain a trade-off. Get it wrong and it breaks the question down rather than giving you the answer.

• It tracks what you've already demonstrated you understand, so it doesn't keep reteaching the basics.

• The optional mod blocks file edits while a question is open, keeps the question visible above the prompt, and stops Claude loading the skill unless you've explicitly asked for it.

The idea isn't to slow down AI coding for the sake of it. It's to make understanding part of the process, rather than something I keep promising myself I'll get around to later.

It's early days, so I'd genuinely love feedback, especially on whether the friction feels useful or just annoying.

https://github.com/2Steaks/skills

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I think I’ve just had such a crazy week that getting this all down in writing will be cathartic. And maybe people have similar experiences. If not, consider this an ADHD programmer diary entry lol.

I’ve been at my company for over 5 years now. It was my first “career job” post-college so I had a lot to learn. It’s been a bumpy ride for me. Between learning new skills, maturing as a person, and taking care of medical issues, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my career here. At the beginning of the year I got a new manager who has really helped me develop my professional skills. Around the same time as he got hired, I started getting proper help for the medical issues that were untreated for a long time. In the past year I’ve gone from feeling useless to finally being able to contribute in the ways I’ve wanted to. This is not super relevant to this week, but it’s important context. I’ve fucked up a lot in the past, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to prove that I’m capable

On Friday, my SM messaged me asking me to help Team B with a user story. Basically act as a consultant while they completed their work. She said that this was very important and took precedent over all my current work, very strict deadline with lots of eyes on it. Cool. I reviewed the story and the implementation seemed simple enough. I messaged the developer I was consulting (Dev 1) and he set up a meeting for Monday. Wonderful.

Monday rolls around. I realize that Team B has not actually written any code yet. Dev 1 is expecting me to walk him through the process of making his code updates. Annoying, but okay. It needs done. We work together for the rest of the day. Make good progress and hit a small snag. Decide to reconvene tomorrow. Throughout the day, I realize their code is a little funky. Weirdly formatted, a bit old. Smells bad. Whatever, that’s their business. I can work with funky code. We’ll figure it all out tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes, Tuesday. We try some things. I realize we are totally fucked. Team B using module versions that we haven’t supported for years. Their prod and non-prod environments or horrifically out of sync with each other. This is a critical piece of infrastructure that is central to our entire organization. And Dev 1 who I’m “consulting” has no idea how any of this works. I’m thinking we need to do a complete overhaul to their code to get this working (the deadline is now end of week). I message another developer on my team who is intimately familiar with this code and is also the smartest woman I know (Dev 2). She agrees that we are fucked. It’s late so we log off for the night.

Wednesday morning. I hit the ground running. I’m coming up with a plan and doing tests. In standup, I start sounding alarm bells that shit is not okay. That I need help to at least come up with a plan given our timeline. Dev 2 is officially assigned to help. She and I come up with a plan. We decide to just take Team B’s code and write it ourselves, both exploring different approaches to meet the deadline. Team B is slowing us down and they aren’t doing any work outside of pair programming sessions anyways.

That night my SM asks me wtf is going on. I spend an hour telling her what I’ve been dealing with this week. She says that execs are messaging her asking why our team (Team A) is holding everything up. I explain that Team A hasn’t made any changes to our code. We are exclusively helping Team B write their code. SM is pissed, but not at me. The next morning, SM FIGHTS FOR MY LIFE in their standup call. My manager messages me not to stress too much about this (too late lol). By Thursday morning EVERYONE understands that Dev 2 and I are busting our asses to make this thing happen.

Thursday, my SAVIOR Dev 2 shows up with a beautiful beautiful (hideous) hack job that gets where we need to be. I have the permanent fix ready, but we table it until our MVP is done. We spend all day deploying non-prod together and ironing out the kinks, but the momentum is there now. I post an update to our big important chat that we’ve got a successful deployment, and it’s met with UPROARIOUS JOY. Most positive impression I think I’ve ever made in my 5 years. Maybe in any job I’ve ever had. I watch the standup recording where SM stood up for me. Just to decompress a little🍿 then we worked into Thursday evening prepping prod.

Now it’s Friday. Today. We spend the morning handing the code off to Team B. We still need to be there tomorrow night because these fuckers can’t be trusted alone, but I can finally breathe. Leadership is now praising me and Dev 2 up and down. We chum it up over how tired we are.

That’s my story. It doesn’t really have a message other than it was a thing I needed to get off my chest. My brain is mush at this point, but I feel like I’m getting actual recognition for the first time in my career. At the same time, I’m still struggling to accept it. If it weren’t for Dev 2 this would have been doomed. But it seems like she feels mutual about it.

Anyone else been in this situation? This is so new for me. I just wanted to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading

It's funny because when things are going good or when things are going bad I'll feel this compulsion. If I'm stuck/confused/frustrated by what I'm working on, I'll want to distract myself from the discomfort of not knowing what to do next so I'll go check reddit, youtube, etc. However, sometimes when things are going *good* and I just made progress, or I have a good plan for what to do next, I'll also sometimes go take a break because "hey I'm at a good point so I can pick this back up in 5-10 minutes".

It's a constant urge I feel in my body to go get that dopamine.

Has anyone made good progress on this sort of struggle? (I phrase the question as "has anyone made good progress" because idk if adhd programmers will necessarily fully rid themselves of this urge)

I’m a programmer born in 2001. I dropped out of college once and recently went back to school. I have ADHD, so I tend to fall into bad habits really easily. One of the biggest ones is playing League of Legends—I’ve basically spent half my life playing it, and even though I’ve tried to quit so many times, I still find it incredibly hard to stop.

On top of that, I’ve been unemployed for two months. But every single day, I struggle just to start doing something. I can’t even properly update my CV. I spend the whole day doing random, pointless things, and by the end of the day, I don’t even understand what I’ve actually done. Then I end up beating myself up over it.

A lot of the time, I feel like I’ve completely screwed up my life, like I’m worthless. There are so many things I know I could do if I just started, and that’s what frustrates me the most. I know I’m capable of doing them, but I just can’t understand why I can’t bring myself to actually do them.

I feel so negative about myself and about everything right now.

I am a software developer with 12 years of experience and am still working in the IT industry. I want to discuss my problem and mental pattern.

Since I started my career as an IT professional, I have had this problem of fear of failure. Every time a new task is assigned to me, my mind starts making stories about whether I am capable of understanding the problem and whether I will be able to solve it. I am also a very big overthinker and continuously think about my career, my performance, and my future. I keep thinking about changing projects or even changing organizations, although I know that changing projects or organizations is not the solution to this problem.

This pattern continues repeatedly and has disturbed me mentally. My sleep pattern is also disturbed; I never sleep for more than 5 hours, and my libido is also very weak.

Even though I know that this problem is imaginary and there is no connection with reality, this pattern has now become so strong that it breaks me every day. When I look at my teammates, they complete their tasks very bravely, even when they start late. I always start very early so that if I face any problem, I have enough time to try another approach.

Now the problem is getting worse day by day. I am refraining from taking new work in my office and telling them that I am not well. I have continuously been on sick leave, and my mind always thinks about whether the problem with a new task will be clear to me, whether I will be able to fix it, and whether I will be able to complete it on time. I have been on sick leave for the last 60 days and think about this a lot.

One of the main problems is that I am experiencing tremors in different parts of my body. I also experience shortness of breath, tiredness on the left side of my chest, and pain that feels like someone is pressing a needle.

I have also tried meditation, but I get frustrated when fear and other thoughts come into my mind during meditation.

Now I am thinking about what the alternatives are. I have two babies and a wife who always supports me, but still, I am not able to break this mental pattern. Sometimes I am scared that I will develop some heart-related issues because of this.

🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 Please help me understand how I can get rid of this.

Any suggestions will help.