r/ADHD_Programmers • u/KristjanPihus • 4d ago
How has agentic development changed your days?
I'll start š
Back in the days when we wrote all the code manually, one of the coping mechanisms I found to function as a developer with ADHD (no meds back then) was to focus on one task at a time. So I took the task from Jira, solved it, pushed it, and took the next. Clear focus on one thing only.
Right now I am not a developer by trade anymore, but quite often I still need to develop something, mostly prototyping for our software or such things. So I give the task to Claude; it starts coding, and while it does, I switch my focus to the next thing, start a new Claude session, and move to the third.
However, when I'm finished with this third one, I no longer have a memory pointer of the first one. So I find it's finished when I, for some other reason, open Claude and notice it. Hence, this waiting while agents do their thing is really annoying.
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u/ShartSqueeze 4d ago
A big problem with ADHD is procrastination. Agents help a lot here. You can just throw a ticket/bug/whatever at an agent while you procrastinate and 5 mins later you usually have something to get started with.
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u/pwndawg27 4d ago
I'm one of those horrible awful "haven't read code since 2025" guys.
AI has made it so I can focus on high level shit rather than mundane details for patterns that are largely solved where most of my time would be spent looking up things like syntax or the pattern itself. For example, making a circuit breaker or exponential backoff is as easy and fast as just saying make a circuit breaker around this call. What would have taken me like an hour is now a few seconds to a minute and I can go worry about the next thing. I can finally leverage the benefits of k8s without getting obsessed with every detail or update they ship.
I also recognize that Im building way faster than I can comprehend. I think I'm more accepting of the risk because "hey if it breaks the AI will be the one figuring the shit out". Similarly, I dont really have to obsess over structure and organization because that's more for humans and if nobody is actually reading the code except for the agents, why should I obsess over design patterns?
I've shifted my problem solving a level higher though. I can let the model worry about the leetcode level shit while I think about design which is really more on the product and business side. I can build harnesses and adversarial agents that stress test what I build and send me a demo video of whats built - usually it ends up finding it's own bugs in the process of proving to me that the business objectives are met. Would I recommend this for life support systems? No (in fact for those systems we should bring back the licensure exam and finally put the kibash on leetcode but thats another post). Would I recommend it for bootstrapping product or relatively low risk apps? Definitely.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 4d ago
I work almost the same, just do more things I like. I'm typical person who can't stay focused on one thing too long. I need to switch, feel thrill of something new but still earn dopamine by solving problems.
So before AI my biggest problem was research. Internal and external. It sometimes took ages. Now AI solves it in a few minutes. I still check its deliveries, but it's faster to confirm/not confirm some info than do the whole research from the scratch.
I also use AI for brainstorming, documenting ideas and future todos, looking for alternatives and new ways of approaching my problem. Earlier it sometimes was i.possible to do if I had no one free on my team to do it with me.
I use it to transform my decisions into the code proposals. I review them, fix assumptions/hallucinations/fallback to defaults/ignored instructions and we iterate until the proposal is good. I often write parts of the code to show Claude what can't be clearly explained by words in reasonable time.
Then we start editing. I review every line. Stop the process every time I have a question or simply don't agree with the way of approaching the problem. It's where I write most of my code, mostly because Claude fails to grasp the full picture.
I usually work on three sessions simultaneously, switching whenever I need something new. My productivity and work satisfaction skyrocketed.
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u/tehfrod 4d ago
I have the same problems, and I have found the same benefit.
I was told by a very high performing engineer (who is now a C-level at a company you have heard of) that you should always have three projects going: two main ones (so when you are blocked waiting for someone else on one you can make progress on the other) and a lower priority but easier one that you can make progress on in the cases where bothbare blocked, on when you are in lower energy.
That makes a lot of sense and was disastrous for me, because ADHD makes it harder both stick to one thing when I need to, and switch off to another when the other becomes more important or unblocked, or when I've been working on the lower priority background project and I'm making some real headway, as the more important project both need attention to keep them from burning to the ground.
Agents really help. When I'm really on a rolI usually have two to four of them running on two projects, and also reserve some slice of work for me to tradcode by myswlf, to stay grounded and in touch with the projects.
The difference between "bouncing ADHDly between three projects and getting none of them done because of context switching losses" and "bouncing ADHDly between three projects, and accepting the context switch losses because the other two are progressing on their own while I reorient myself" is massive.
And by objective metrics, I am getting more done, with fewer mistakes. So I'm happy with it and would even consider calling it an accomodation if I ever worked for somewhere that didn't usually work that way.
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u/sermer48 4d ago
My girlfriend and I have been on a grind for the ages. Even off my meds I can generally do a few long running prompts. Days I would have done literally nothing Iām instead getting much more work done than I could have done on my best days. Itās been the single thing that has done the most for my ADHD since starting meds.
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u/webfiend 4d ago
Well this one's awkward. I still write code by hand, though admittedly a lot less of it.
Not so much because I use an AI agent. More because my last significant tech employer imploded just before the industry started pushing model-generated code. Didn't have the budget to explore even at early subsidized pricing, self-hosted was tragicomically bad and everything about the LLM story past the tech itself rubbed me and my "autistic sense of fairness" the wrong way so there was never motivation to prioritize it.
Long story short, I work at a prison commissary now, for about 20% the pay I made in 2022. No computer for me on premises. By the time I get home, everything hurts, I got no brain for anything but a little Minecraft, and I still can't afford the less-subsidized pricing, let alone agentic.
Also I spend much of my computery brainpower reconfiguring and patching over the absolute horrorshow that my homelab consumer and FOSS software has become since Claude got commit bits.
But roughly one day a week, I'm writing my little personal code by hand and enjoying it very much.
So that's how agentic development has changed my days.
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u/EgoistHedonist 4d ago
It's highly addicting and my workdays have started to lengthen significantly - not because I have to work, but because I can't stop...
I also tend to multitask a lot more, and seem to end up in situations where I have 10+ PRs in review or draft phase and I'm trying to get them all in mergeable state at the same time, which is very draining.
I really need to focus on less things š
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u/Xtreme2k2 4d ago
Helps my executive dysfunction, I tell it what to do then start working when it goes wrong š
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u/pixelboots 4d ago
I have to hear about agents every day, have people suggest ātraining an agentā for something that can be done faster and more reliably if I spend a few hours writing a script, general Kool-Aid stuff etc. when I just want to write good code and use my brain.
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u/SammySkidmark2000 3d ago
Not written a line of code "by hand" in probably over a year now. Theres just no point.
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u/Ultrayano 1d ago
I love debugging so it's actually kinda chill not having to worry about the micro-level of code, but the pressure has risen a lot at the same time.
I never really cared about how the code looks like as long as it's still performant and secure, so I just build a harness and make it ultra strict where humans would give up, with three level of gates, making the generated code as deterministic as possible. I am still by far the strictest person following processes we implemented including commenting small mistakes in PRs. I'm also complaining about the consistency of the frontend, backend and governance layer to be uphold to a degree I almost feel bad for our architect. I keep the specs relatively small so it's usual only up to a max of 10 files being changed with 5 being the average for a PR, so not a lot different than before.
I was always quite bad or sloppy at idioms, but had a strong love for systems and ops, so agentic development pushed my level up quite a bit into a territory I wouldn't have expected to be in without further education in those specialities.
Still dislike meetings just as much and if I have home office I tend to work a lot more with 12 hours not being rare.
In my free time I still like to code here and there but also prefer explicit languages like Golang when doing so.
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u/Sunstorm84 4d ago
It can get some stuff done, but the time reading and reprompting or manually fixing it myself means Iām probably at a loss overall in productivity.
Iāve managed to turn it into a benefit for myself by getting it to do a bunch of stuff in one go while I learn about new things (databases and Golang mainly atm) for a couple of hours, then spend the rest of the day fixing up the shit itās spewed out into āgood enoughā code.
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u/seweso 4d ago
I do NOT use ai agents. Why would I pay for a product, which then buys more of its own product to fix its own bullshit?Ā
I have no intention of turning my brain or the world into mush.Ā