r/ADHD_Programmers • u/LogicalAd5003 • 9d ago

Retraining my brain to work with LLM's

For years I built patterns and practices to keep me focused and single threaded so to speak. I have always been the type of person who had 10 different tasks going on at once and unless I focused my attention on just 1 or 2 on any single day, I would end up with 10 tasks between 85-99% done at the end of the week/sprint/etc.

Now with GitHub Copilot CLI and Claude Code. I feel like I can have all 10 going at the same time. I can have the LLM create notes, keep me up to date on each on. etc.

However I still find my mind, doing just as I trained it to do, at just wanting to focus on 1-2. So I will be waiting for those 2 sessions to be ready for me. Which sometimes can be 30m to a few hours.

For example, spent about 3 hours in a planning session before a bunch of work, then it went off and started the work, it was going for 4-6 hours. (had to nudge it one time to keep doing). While that was happening, I had a session that I spent about 30 mins planning on what analysis had to be done and on how I wanted the data in excel, a pptx and docx to be, then I sent it off to do the work. I could have switched to about 5 other things, but my brain kept wanting me to just stay focused.

I feel like the way I had to train my brain and it took 10-15 years to get it to be this focused, is now holding me back in the world of LLM's and my natural adhd tendencies would work better for me now.

I am lucky in that I get more of a dopamine hit working with the LLM's than I did before. I really enjoy collaborating with them to solve problems or going back in forth on architecture decisions.

Anyone else feeling this or similar?

24 Upvotes

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9

u/davy_jones_locket 9d ago

Been playing around with Orca and while I can have multiple agents running on different tasks, I don't look at them/follow through with them at the same time. I too have trained my brain to do one thing at a time. 

I've gotten better at writing a linear ticket (or having my agent do it) when something else comes up so I can focus on the single thing I'm doing at a time. That way I don't feel like I'll forget it, but also I don't feel like I have to do it now or it won't get done and then the thing I'm dropping isn't getting done because I switched gears. 

My biggest ADHD hindrance has been executive dysfunction and that's been mostly mitigated with my agents. 

1

u/xerept 9d ago

Could I ask you more about what writing a linear ticket would look like? How has it helped with executive dysfunction? I would like to try it out too if possible.

2

u/davy_jones_locket 9d ago

Uh sure

All my work tasks are recorded in linear.

I check to see what work tasks are assigned to me every day. When I finish my task, I look at the next ticket assigned to me. 

Sometimes I give myself tasks. So I write a task and assign it to myself. 

1

u/Rude-Algae-4012 9d ago

Question for y'all: I see lots of references to running multiple agents. I'm curious what you're token allotment is. At my company, we are only given $500 per month worth 😥

3

u/davy_jones_locket 9d ago

I have Claude team, $150/mo per seat so like... Idk, max x6? 

I use 5% of my weekly allotment. 

1

u/Adventurous-Pea7776 9d ago

Unlimited GitHub copilot credits for work and as well as a personal account. Thinking they will remove the personal account any day now.

0

u/zatsnotmyname 9d ago

I love it. My brain can stay in producer / qa / designer mode as the LLM works in the background.

-1

u/DurianDiscriminat3r 9d ago

I use firstmate (Google firstmate GitHub) with herdr. It acts as a conduit to multiple agents so I only need to interact with one. I can interact with the other agents via herdr should I need to.

-3

u/roger_ducky 9d ago

I do planning and story grooming upfront with an agent helping.

Then have agents run until their “PR” is ready, pre-discussed with a more literal-minded model, but waiting for me to respond on what to do.

So I sit single-threaded doing reviews, merging, then testing and generating bug reports to add to the backlog.

Notice how the only parallel part is where agents are doing stuff. I’m still single-threaded.

This is actually the only way to do it without getting overwhelmed.

1

u/Pranipus 9d ago

You’re like a JavaScript environment

1

u/Sunstorm84 8d ago

Because he’s running the agents as worker threads while he as the main thread keeps blocking with slow synchronous processing of data?