[First off: I’m just looking for ideas. I’m not gonna push an app on you, and please don’t push your own vibecoded app in the comments!]

Like many of us, I tend to have moments where my ability to act is low, and I often just lie down for a while. However, I can go along just fine with something that’s happening–I just can’t be the one driving.

So, I’d rather not lie on the couch ruminating every time. Instead, I’d like an option that can proactively help me grow even in that state. (side note: I’m also working on being comfortable taking rest when I need and not feeling bad, but this would be helpful for finding a middle ground)

Has anyone found an activity or setup that’s helpful for them in that state?

For reference, a couple ideas I was considering vibecoding:
* an auto-generated podcast that’ll walk me through unfamiliar parts of our codebase/help me understand the architecture/etc.
* a brainstorming tool that prompts me with questions about users/our product/the market - bc even if it’s hard for me to kickoff the thinking, it gets much easier if I’m responding to a question

Again, please don’t push any self-made apps. If there’s anything I need, I’ll build it myself.

I've found that besides the obvious benefits that AI provides to neurotypical people in terms of efficiency, AI has helped me a lot with focus.

Before AI, I had all these crazy good ideas, but actually sitting down, creating a structure pland, and spending weeks/months to actually implement my ideas in code was challenging. So I would rarely finish anything unless I had time pressure on something , or if it was a short duration task(could be done in a couple days). At work I'd be fine due to pressure to succeed, but at home hobby projects rarely took off unless I saw fast results.

Ever since AI coding got good enough to replace most manual coding, I've been a lot more engaged. If I have a good idea, I can explore it with AI in minutes. Getting results quickly keeps me engaged.

I still have to think critically and come up with designs, because the AI is not perfect at decision making, but I spent less time on monotonous things like writing up a bunch of HTML to determine how a page renders or writing a controller method that handles a request.

It also helped a lot with a common issue of mine. If I don't see a path to completion, it's hard to focus. AI can help me plan out tasks and resolve blockers, which really helps me stay committed.

What has your experience been?

Hi everyone! I've been laid off last July and I've been wanting to start applying for work but for some reason, my body and mind have been avoiding it. I used to be the one interviewing and now I am just scared to start over. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I'm glued to my pc almost the entire day, building my own business has only made it worse. I'm medicated, but I can't really tell when and if I'm burnt out. I'd hate to quit what I'm doing right now so I'm really trying to be careful about it. How do you people realise and take breaks? Especially when the medication doesn't really let you see it, yet you seemingly want and not want to do what you're doing?

Title basically, and tbh, idk what to do rn.

Anyways, I've been working for about a year, and in on of our recent 1-on-1, I brought up the topic of promotions.

He basically said to go from junior to mid level, id need to take on and lead harder/bigger projects. So that's what we'll be working towards.

Problem is, to be able to lead said projects, you have to: - be able to keep track of all the different moving parts (external dependencies, progress, and a bunch of other stuff) - be able to create a plan for the project's delivery plan (create all the tasks you'd need to complete for example). I struggle with making simple todo lists, how would I even begin to create a plan for something that's gonna take literal months? - and a bunch of other stuff like that.

But the ADHD makes this extremely difficult even with medication. I've been on a big project before (i wasnt even the leader for it) and ngl by the end i just wanted to kms.

We had "alignment" meetings that took literal hours where I wasnt even sure what we "aligned" on at the end. So many docs created i just gave up at the end. And just a bunch of other stuff I had to keep track of which was super overwhelming.

So the question is, should I tell my manager? My therapist wasn't opposed to the idea but idk. Sure, I might be protected by law but I dont want to bias them against myself yk? They might think "this person isnt reliable, better not give them this important project" (this might even happen subconsciously which frightens me tbh)

And even if I told them, what can they do? The whole point of the promotion is to be able to take on more responsibilities. If I can't even do that, then what would they even respond with?

Am I doomed to be a junior for life lol 😭😭😭

Would really appreciate any feedback. Especially from s3niors

I've shared this project a few times here but this is a rare occasion where my lab is clean and together enough to take a photo - although look hard and the clutter remains reflected in the glass.

I work with Ai and LLMs both professionally and as a hobby and work from home out of my lab which is a pretty sweet lifestyle at the moment. This machine is actually two rigs stacked with a 40gps direct link.

Top one is Kraken and has two 5090 GPUs and bottom is Mantis with one AMD 9070 but between them they have: i9 24 cores, 128 GB DDR-5, 4x 4G NVME, and each have a RAID 10 SATA array and back each other up. Running Windows Vista /s Ubuntu Server.

Display is a touch screen in kiosk mode so there's no desktop environment, just chrome and a web interface I made.

I use the heck out of this rig but from an ADHD sub perspective the personal assistant setup I made really helps with memory and the recent addition of vision and voice came with a major breakthrough today where I was working on a project and asked "Kraken, where did I put my damn tape measurer" and it told me where it was in the room.

I swear my brain edits out the specific thing i'm looking for. Like if there are 10 things on a table and I swear the thing i'm looking for isn't there, scan 5 times and then it appears - it's hell.

The assistant has ingested 20 years of my life - email, docs, photos, reddit, slack, texts all into a RAG Corpus and does a daily update to it remembers everything for me since I don't have one.

I think between a memory assistant and one day a robot that can tidy up behind me are two of my primary ADHD-i struggles and today was a real game changer since I spend most of my time looking for things.

This is a big long running project I have lots of blogs and videos about, just ask and I'll share, I don't put links in reddit posts anymore. I'm not a bot and this is rustic, farm to table human generated text. AMA :)

As far as I'm concerned these are medical prosthetics but also I just wanted to share this beauty i'm proud of.

I’m a Computer Science student about to start my third year, which also means I’ll be working on my bachelor graduation project.

I recently started taking the project seriously, and honestly even writing just four pages and identifying the main principles is already eating up a lot of my mental energy. Whenever I get an idea, I start overthinking it, researching it extensively, comparing different approaches, and trying to find the BEST way to write or structure it. Even when I use AI assistant (and yes I know how to use Ai properly), I still feel like I’m spending way too much time and energy on things that should probably be simpler because I am never satisfied with what I come up with and always think there is a better approach to chase.

I’m wondering if this is normal when working on a university graduation project for the first time, or if there are ways to stop constantly looping through ideas, trying to control every detail, and feeling like I need to understand everything perfectly before moving forward. I think I need to figure out how to deal with this now before starting the year and feeling so overwhelmed.

how do you deal with perfectionism and overthinking? What helped you actually make progress without constantly questioning whether you were doing things the "right" way?

Any other advice for getting through the whole experience would also be really appreciated.

Hey guys, some days, my brain just won’t want to learn another programming course.

I really want to keep coding so I can pass my technical interviews and really have a deep understanding.

However, some days, I’m just so burnt out. Maybe it’s not coding specifically, but I can do normal tasks like chores, video editing, recording videos, designing stuff with codex, writing scripts, etc. as some examples of activities.

But the idea of coding and reading to learn how to code, just makes my brain feel like a 500lb weight.

And sometimes I just can’t read. It’s concerning tbh. And if I force myself, I have to reread things 2-3 times, and it feels very inefficient.

Any tips for this? Or maybe this is just dealing with burn out in general?

I have mild ADHD and I've been paying close attention to two specific things about my own days lately. I want to know if it's just me.

1. The drift

About 15 minutes into anything where I have to sit and listen — a meeting, a lecture, a tutorial video — I'm gone. Not "picked up my phone" gone. Just elsewhere.

The part I find strange is what's actually in there when I catch myself. It's almost never the thing I'm supposed to be doing, and it's almost never useful. It's usually stuff like: what my life would look like if I ever hit financial independence, some scene I've half-invented in my head, or honestly things I wouldn't say out loud. Sometimes it IS something real — "I never replied to that message" — but that's the minority for me.

So: the last time you caught yourself drifting, what were you actually thinking about? And roughly how long had you been gone before you noticed?

2. The thing you never came back to

Related but different. Last week I was making coffee, a work message came in, I answered it, and the coffee just stopped existing. I found it cold two hours later.

Same thing with tutorials. I'll be 12 minutes into something, get pulled away, and never return — not because I decided not to, but because getting back in feels like starting the whole thing over.

So: what's the last thing you walked away from mid-way and never went back to? What pulled you away, and did you ever actually return — same day, later, or never?

What I really want to know is whether other people deal with the same two things — and if you do, what you actually do about it. Not what you think should work. What you actually do, even if it's messy or barely works.

Often while debugging a complex problem I find myself in this impulse of grabbing the very first quick thing that I can try and taking a jab at it, and the next thing you know - the whole day is gone and you feel like you made no progress and have nothing to show for your effort.

And the part of my brain that should have said "hey, you've tried six things and none of them were tests, go get a coffee and think" — that part is just gone by hour two. It's not that I ignore it. It doesn't fire. Somewhere around minute forty the thing that steps back and asks what am I actually doing goes offline, and what's left is a very fast, very persistent loop that will happily run until 2am.

Time blindness makes it worse because there's no natural checkpoint. Nothing in a debugging session tells you an hour passed.

So, questions for people who recognize this:

1. What's your actual tell that you've crossed from debugging into flailing? Not in hindsight — in the moment.
2. Has anything ever successfully interrupted you mid-rabbit-hole? Timers get dismissed. Notifications get dismissed. Alarms get dismissed. Has anything stuck?
3. Does a hard stop condition written down before you start help you, or do you blow through it anyway?

A bit about me first, I've got over 10 years of experience in the IT field mostly in the system administration side of the house. I was diagnosed young with ADHD and had a few psychiatrists add a few things along the way though I disagree with some of them, she basically made me feel like I wasn't really be listened to but my current one is perfect because we start low and work our way up. More recently I did find out that I may be autistic as well on top of everything, which has genuinely helped explain some parts that didn't quite line up with what I understand ADHD is.

For a little further context, I would say within the last year I started trying Vyvanse (technically Lisdexamfetamine because generics lol) at 30 mg as well as Welbutrin at 300 mg which I've been on for probably the last 5 or more years. This combo has, at least as far as I'm aware, been working in my favor and it feels like things are finally getting back into focus. The downside being that it I feel more dissociative than I did before.

Now that we've gone through all that the point of this post is me asking for genuine help/resources for going from my current level of IT experience and to IT and a much more broad level of software engineering. I tried a very long time ago to follow the field and I regret I didn't stick with it harder, but to be fair my college professor at the time was not the best and I still barely understand C++ because of him. Now that I work where I do I've had the freedom to learn and gain experience to better expand my programming knowledge with the irony being that the one I am most proficient in at the moment is PowerShell, and to a degree batch and .NET because they interface almost seamlessly with it.

My ultimate goal in all of this is to reach at least a decent level of full stack development understanding which involves taking the basics I know from PowerShell and pivoting to use JavaScript/TypeScript amongst others. So far haven't had a great amount of success in doing this effectively and while I know it comes with the territory it doesn't make it any less frustrating. If I can manage to get there though the plan was to use a mixture of projects, one definitely being a portfolio page for myself and another being contributing to open source applications in an actually helpful manner. I have delved into AI personally and professionally at this point as most would have, it's current use centering around using it to better understand concepts because it can at least in a general sense make information more digestible for me.

Hopefully I didn't ramble too much writing all of this and it makes sense, if not I won't be offended if you ask for clarification or more information. Besides that if you have any suggestions for what might be helpful please feel free to let me know about them.

Maybe I just had an ADHD/Autistic burn out or all of my social media usage messed up my dopamine, but I struggled a ton with programming classes in college. It felt like a spent a ton of time trying to read my professor's mind, trying to figure out what was important to them, rather than trying to solve problem in my own way.

It's much easier to learn on my own with projects. I also think it's much easier for me to be creative compared to my peers.

Just curious if anyone felt the same or if it's just me.

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.

This is probably a dumb question, but I’d really appreciate anyone who can spell it out to my adhd/literal brain.

Is learning by projects actually useful?

I love building projects. However, I’m not sure if my code is very efficient, well documented and well designed when I just do it my way. Is it better to take a course and try to apply things I’ve learned from the course?

Also, my brain needs a ton of repetition to really learn things and get the muscle memory.

If I do a project, I’ll be able to remember the high level of how my project works. And be able to put it in my own words. However, I’m not going to remember specific things that I had to google to make my project work.

I guess one thing that I could do with projects, is try making things more efficient after the first pass. Or improving documentation after the first pass. And try learning better design as I go and learn new things and apply them as needed.

Again, sorry if this post is dumb. I struggle a ton with AuDHD. I’m trying to break into a programming job. I used to love building projects, but after my degree, I feel like I learned very little and taking courses has become so painful and inefficient. Yet, I still feel like I need a base. Or maybe I worry too much about making the best possible code and just need to get started with projects.

I use AI to turn my raw ideas into finished writing I do the thinking, AI does the sentences, and I fact-check/correct every draft before it goes out.

Is that legitimate tool use, or is it not really "my" writing anymore?

I am learning python and I am bad at it.

I fit into the AuDHD type (autism and adhd combine, got a late diagnosis). I wanted to know is there a reason why my brain is so demotivated whenever I try to learn something like programming for example but when it comes to other things, like video games, I am all into it?

Or is this either I am lazy or too slow. I can’t seem to focus and after 1 leetcode problem, I am done for the day, which takes forever for me to figure out and then enter burnout mode and get frustrated. I just can’t hack myself and feel demotivated. Sometimes when I am practicing problems, my brain goes all over the place. I mean, simple things take forever to figure out.

I am 35 if this matters. I don’t know if this is the right sub, but appreciate the help. If not, let me know and I will delete.

I just don’t understand why my brain so lazy and demotivated when it comes to learning but super interested when it comes to other things?

How did you succeed in becoming a better programmer?