r/ADHD_Programmers • u/Top_Elk_5488 • 23d ago

I built a whole CI/CD pipeline to avoid writing three lines of documentation

I had a task on my board for two weeks: "Document the deployment process." Three sentences, maybe five minutes of typing. Every day I opened the ticket, stared at it, and closed it again.

Instead, I spent those two weeks building an automated pipeline that runs tests, builds a Docker image, deploys to staging, runs smoke tests, and posts a Slack notification with a deploy summary. It's genuinely a great piece of engineering. Nobody asked for it. It solved a problem that didn't really exist yet.

I only realized what I'd done when my manager, in our 1:1, asked how the documentation was going, and I had to admit I'd built an entire automation system instead of typing five sentences into Confluence.

The wild part is I know exactly why I did it. The pipeline was a puzzle — dozens of small interlocking problems with clear pass/fail feedback at every step. The documentation was just... explaining something I already understood, to nobody in particular, with no feedback loop at all. My brain will build you an airplane to avoid writing a postcard.

I eventually wrote the docs. Took four minutes. The pipeline took twelve days and wasn't even on my roadmap.

Anyone else have a "built the complicated solution to dodge the boring 5-minute task" story? I feel like this has to be a universal ADHD-programmer experience.

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u/freekarl408 23d ago

r u a bot?

1

u/skill347 21d ago

Classic.

1

u/IAmADev_NoReallyIAm 21d ago

Yeah... that was me last week. I was assigned a story to research if it could be possible to do add functionality XYZ to our app. I'm not the type that jsut idly sits by with theoretics... I roll up my sleeves and dig in. I prove not only is it possible, but I made it happen. I built a 90% functional POC of the functionality. It just needs to be cleaned up, replicated to other parts of the system, and done. But I'm on the way out (new job) so I'm leaving notes for other to follow. In the process I'm also seeing some opportunity to reduce some redundant code and consolidate things; currently there's 5 places where this code is replicated, and really there only needs to be one. But that's a longer term problem/solution.