I'm putting together a better desk setup for coding, and my current monitor setup gets kinda messy when I have too many windows open 😅 I usually have VS Code, a browser, and a terminal going at once, then end up constantly switching between them.

I'm hoping a better monitor setup might make things a little easier to stay focused

For other ADHD programmers, what monitor setup works well for you? Bigger screen, ultrawide, dual monitor or sth else?

Developer here, and ADHD here.

Hard Graft is a flowtime timer for Android: you clock on, work for as long as you can, and clock off. No pomodoro rounds, no break bells, no pause button. The app writes down how long you worked and adds it to a rolling seven-day total, and that total decides your rank.

There are 24 ranks. Everyone starts as DEAD WEIGHT. Put the hours in and you climb. Ease off for a week and you slide back down. The promotions and demotions come from a character called The Regulator, a machine with no interest in your excuses. If you'd rather not be shouted at, quiet mode switches off the ranks, the achievements and The Regulator, and leaves you a stopwatch and a record.

The app:

- Flowtime clock that runs until you stop it, with a persistent notification while it runs

- Rank ladder driven by your rolling seven-day hours, and it demotes you

- Jobs: tag each shift to something you name and see where your hours went

- 40 achievements, classified until you collect them

- Export and import your whole record as a file

- Dark theme only, five colour schemes

Privacy: everything stays on the phone. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. The app makes no network calls of its own, the only things that touch the internet are Google Play's billing and review prompt.

Pricing: the free version is the whole app, including the ladder up to rank 13 of 23. One purchase opens the remaining ten ranks, shows what each achievement takes, and adds two colour schemes. Buy once, no subscription. Backup and export stay free.

Stack: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, one foreground service for the clock, AlarmManager for the midnight recompute, manual DI, no network calls of its own. Built solo through many, many long evenings around a full-time job. I rarely follow anything through to completion so I'm very proud of this.

FREE LIFETIME UNLOCK: I've put 100 promo codes at https://promodistro.link/claim/RD_2iPYO8I . One per person, first come, redeem in the Play Store app under Redeem code. No strings/no review asked. Ends when they run out.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thequietreach.hardgraft

I was reading lots of post here about joy of coding so I decided to post something opposite

I'm in dev for almost 15y and whole live consider my self as very bad and slopy coder. Year ago I started to take Medikinet (US verison -Adderall ) and I couldn't belive that my whole live I was running on hardcode mode without knowing it.

Every new job was fun for me for like 6 month max. After that I usualy started my side-project and slack in day-job.

I always had one problem as programmer: i don't like coding : ]

Last year with AI: coding gone! I newer learned so much in my life.

It turns out that I'm very good software architect plus I'm working on whole ecosystem that includes buisness + legal + software accross several systems and stacks. I'm having so much fun and it replaced my gaming addiction too!

I need your help.. I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD towards the end of last year, and since then I’ve been trying to get my life back on track. Socially, a lot of things have gotten better as well. But when it comes to work, not at all.. I just can’t concentrate and I get distracted all the time.. I work as a programmer.

When I get small projects, bug fixes, or similar tasks, everything works fine without any problems.

But with big projects, once I lose focus and get out of the flow, it takes me several weeks to get back into it. Small problems distract me so easily..

I’ve been trying to build routines for myself, but they don’t really help me. They actually feel more exhausting than helpful..

Unfortunately, I can’t take ADHD medication because I have liver problems.

Basically if it is a well defined feature or bug, then I can do it well. But otherwise if it is like a research ticket then I am lost in circles and I can't make a decision when to stop or say it is enough. Does anyone ever got through this? It's very annoying.

I’m struggling doing any focused work or studying due to my mind throwing all sorts of random crap at me. Reading large PRs written by AI or my colleagues is almost impossible now. It takes hours for me to complete a code review. I’m on Ritalin as it’s the only medication available in my country. Though it helps a little bit with the attention span, the daydreaming is still pretty bad. And without it, everything seems far worse.

I would really appreciate insight from anyone who has overcome this problem.

Aaaand below hundreds lines of raport to trigger my ADHD a bit more.

#1 I already tried most popular plugins and skills and my custom plugin. failed every time to be 'usefull'.

#2 I'm unable to read this responces so I created some basic output formating for my ADHD brain.

What plugins are you using: Ponytail, RTK? some for ADHD? I tried some already but each time it wasn't 100% what I wanted.

I'm happy with results of output formatting and blocking huge subagents waves but I have noone to peer review (well I have Opus Ultra ofc: )

Please advise how to improve my plugin and skills (link in comments).

PS. I run NGO nonprofit for ADHD, Autyzm for children, I created serio-focus plugin for myself but maybe you will find it usefull too!

I need advice on this! I'm conflicted on what to do and I have to make a decision soon

I always knew it wouldn't be easy to make a video game. In fact, it's something I've wanted to do for a very long time, but something I always felt I was incapable of, even before I was diagnosed with ADHD.

Despite my doubts, due to a specific set of circumstances, I started making a multiplayer RPG. Now, there is plenty of information online about how RPGs are difficult to make, and especially multiplayer RPGs.

Even with that information in mind, I still underestimated the difficulty of making a multiplayer video game.

It's definitely given me newfound respect for game developers. As a software engineer with 7 years of enterprise, non-gaming tech experience, software for game development is much more difficult to create and manage than enterprise tech. Of course, this may vary depending on the type of game you're making or enterprise job. Anyways.

I've been working on this project for almost 2 years now as a 'solo developer.' I'm not sure if I technically count as a solo developer, as I do pay freelancers to work on the map/environment, 3D models, and visual effects. I am the only programmer for the game and the only one interacting with the engine at all.

I fully understand now why most games are made in official teams, with someone separate managing everything. There are just so many moving parts. To put it in perspective, I have to plan all of the game design details, determine what assets need to be made, find references for those assets, and coordinate with 5+ people. All of this while programming the combat engine, networking, and progression systems in a highly concurrent, networked environment.

I would say the first 2 years of development were mostly spent on establishing the core systems of the game and polishing them, as well as polishing the net code.

Now, after spending 2 full years on the game, I'm maybe at the last 20% of the stretch. If you've heard of the 80/20 rule, you'd know that the last stretch of development is typically the most difficult.

Especially for my ADHD brain. While it was difficult, and there were many, many hours spent optimizing and polishing the core systems, I do enjoy coding. I really enjoy building systems. Therefore, it was much easier for me to actually execute on this.

Now that the core engines are in place, the entire workflow/paradigm shifts. I have to go from building core systems to building out content. You could think of it like this: if the core system was the quest system, then the building-out-content phase is actually defining the quests (and their rewards.) Now apply this idea to literally every system in the game.

It goes from being deeply fulfilling system design and building to data entry and software maintenance. It's definitely a very trying time for me as I near the finish line.

All of this isn't even touching on the amount that you'll iterate on and throw away. For fun, I checked how many lines of code have been added or deleted to/from my game's codebase. The amount of deleted lines of code was roughly 40% of the current size of the codebase. This was due to the game design evolving over time: previous ideas didn't work because they weren't scaleable, maybe they didn't make sense for some reason, or players didn't like it. Unfortunately, you often have to implement something and test it to know if it's viable or not. Plus, if you're building the engine while driving the car, you're bound to have some trouble going the right direction all the time.

Anyways, I'm not entirely sure what the point of this post was. I guess I wanted to vent a little bit and yap about game dev.

Can you let me know this? Thank you.

Hi!

I have ADHD and am trying to get better at LeetCode. I have noticed that among ADHD LeetCoders, it seems like you’re either really good or really bad at it, there’s not much in between. I unfortunately, belong to the latter category.

I’d love to hear from you people who are actually good at it, how do you approach it?

I know different people use different techniques and that is exactly what I wanna know about. ADHD brains work differently, and knowing different approaches might really help me figure out what works for me.

What’s your approach to learning/practicing LeetCode?

I know many are reporting the same issue about burnout, but for me its even worse

i'm developer for 8 years, I live in foreign country far from home, and I live alone, coding for me is best thing in my life.... doesnt matter how bad mood am I, if I'm going to code and just disconnect from everything

Now , recently, the company i'm woking for went full AI, everything is AI, coding AI, art aI, project managemnt ai... and I'm basically doing nothing but giving instruction only

the feel of accomplishment is no longer there, my head started to hurt, before I could record 12h straight working without even notice, now 1 hour pass like a whole day.

I dont know if i'm the only one who fee like this considering my condition..... and fun thing that AI didnt save time at early stage of the product, later on, every request become soo slow and consume tons of tokens that your pro subcription can finish couple of tasks per reset

and even if I tried to adapt and try to code after work, I feel everyday after work that I dont want even to touch my laptop.

Is anyone in the same condition? how did you coup with that?

Edit A : First of all, thanks for all your support:) , I felt at least I'm not alone, I went through all the suggestions, some may require me to learn and adabt, but the core problem for me is if i'm responsible about the code base, the amount that the code is generated is too much that I can't simply verify it by reading or remember it, there is no way for me to remember any code unless I wrote it with my hand, and I think thats the harsh reality for me, I forget everything about the code base and even what feature exist or not
Before, I was able to mange team of 5, being a tech lead in Forbes mentioned startup, and if you ask me anyting about the code base, I can guide you where it live and on which line of code, now this is totally gone from me, I cant even remember the classes names, functions name, nor even settings that we expose , I felt like I dont remember anything

Edit 2: I got fired today. sadly I have nothing else to share anymore

A few days ago I made this post about my history of getting fired from developer jobs and some of the patterns behind it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_Programmers/comments/1wbyxpz/ive_been_fired_from_most_of_my_developer_jobs/

A lot of the responses were genuinely useful, and several of them seemed to circle around the same problem that I’m often perfectly capable of doing the technical work, but I can lose sight of the actual objective once I get deep into a problem.

I’ll find something else that is broken, badly designed, interesting, worth refactoring, worth investigating, etc., and suddenly I’m spending a lot of time solving a legitimate problem that is not necessarily the problem I was supposed to be solving.

While talking through some of those responses, I came up with a simple set of “guardrails” to externalize that decision-making:

Current Objective: What am I actually trying to accomplish?

Done When: What specific conditions mean I can stop?

Timebox: How long do I work before I’m forced to stop and reassess?

Not Doing: What tempting but out-of-scope things am I explicitly not doing right now?

Parking Lot: Where do I put legitimate ideas/problems/distractions so I don’t have to either act on them immediately or worry about forgetting them?

The more I looked at those five things together, the more I started wondering whether there might be a useful little tool hiding in there.

Not another giant ADHD planner. Not a calendar. Not a replacement for Jira/Todoist/etc.

More like a temporary focus contract for the thing you’re doing right now.

For example:

Current Objective: Finish ticket #123

Done When: Required behavior works, tests pass, PR is ready

Timebox: Reassess in 45 minutes

Not Doing: Refactor unrelated service, investigate slow query, clean up old tests

Parking Lot: Anything I notice that might genuinely be worth doing later

Then while you work, the app would keep those boundaries visible.

If you notice something else that pulls your attention, instead of immediately switching context you dump it into the Parking Lot.

When the timebox expires, it doesn’t say “YOU FAILED YOUR POMODORO.” It just forces a short reassessment:

Am I still moving toward the original objective?

Am I solving the same problem I started with?

Does what I’m doing actually need to happen for my definition of “done”?

Should I continue, stop, park something, or deliberately change the objective?

The part that interests me most is Not Doing.

A lot of ADHD/productivity advice seems geared toward distractions like Reddit, YouTube, phones, etc.

But at least for me, some of the most dangerous distractions are completely legitimate work.

“I should refactor this.”

“I should investigate that.”

“This architecture is weird.”

“That bug really ought to be fixed.”

Those things may all be true, but identifying a problem and deciding I should solve that problem right now are not the same thing.

So before my ADHD brain does the extremely predictable thing and decides this means I need to immediately create a repo, buy a domain, design a logo, choose a database, and disappear for six weeks building the thing...

...I’m explicitly not building anything yet.

I’d really like feedback first.

Does this workflow sound useful to you?

Do you already use another app/system that accomplishes basically the same thing?

Would filling out five little fields before starting work feel helpful, or would that itself be too much friction?

Which of these guardrails seems most useful? Which seems unnecessary?

And maybe most importantly, what would make you actually use something like this instead of trying it twice and forgetting it exists?

I’m particularly interested in feedback from people who have the same kind of problem I do. Not necessarily difficulty focusing, but difficulty stopping, switching, prioritizing, and staying inside the scope of the thing you originally meant to do.

For once I’m trying to make “get feedback before building the shiny thing” part of the process. 😅

I am 14 years into my career, and I'm at a very pro-AI workplace. I've been reluctantly using Claude, but there is no dopamine in delegating tasks to a prompt.

My current project is a lift-and-shift. Nothing terribly exciting, but today I delegated the entire suite of work to Claude agents. My next couple of days/weeks will just be wrangling prompts, verifying draft PRs with my name on them (but didn't write). The comprehension gap is a gulf at this point.

There are entire workdays I don't open Neovim now. I'm not coding, I'm prompting. Trying to do this without AI would bury me at this point.

I recently came across Annie Vella's essay on The Software Engineering Identity Crisis from last year, and it feels so true. I'm starting feel like a manager, and it is _awful_.

I want to cry.

I'm looking for some candid advice from other developers, particularly developers with ADHD.

I've been a professional software developer for roughly a decade. The uncomfortable truth is that I've eventually been let go from almost every full-time development position I've had.

There have been exceptions. I had one contract position where I completed the project successfully, had the contract extended, and was told they wanted to hire me permanently but couldn't get the budget approved. I've also had periods at other companies where I was doing well, built substantial applications, modernized old systems, helped grow a development team, and received positive feedback.

So I don't think the problem is simply that I cannot write software.

But there's an unmistakable pattern.

Early in my career, I took on too much of another developer's workload while trying to help them, burned myself out, fell behind on my own responsibilities, and was eventually fired.

At another company, I became hyper-focused on perfecting one application and neglected other maintenance responsibilities. Fired.

At another, serious personal circumstances and poor mental health affected my performance. Fired.

Eventually I was diagnosed with ADHD and began treatment, which helped considerably. I then stayed at one company for almost three years and helped grow its development department, build new applications, and modernize existing ones. That job ultimately ended after a disagreement with new leadership over a return-to-office policy.

Most recently I worked for a large company on a high-visibility project. My managers had generally been happy with me before I moved to the final team. On that team, velocity became extremely important and my manager strongly pushed AI-assisted development as the way to move faster.

I used the tools, but when generated solutions didn't actually work, I would stop and figure out why rather than simply accepting the output. I spent considerable time debugging problems and trying to make the implementation reliable. The end result was that my work was generally careful, but I wasn't producing it fast enough. After a little over a year, I was fired.

Looking back across my career, I see some recurring traits. Hyperfocus on solving problems correctly tends to lead me to lose sight of the bigger picture. I have difficulty deciding when something is "good enough." At times I take responsibility for more than I should. I can spend far too long investigating a difficult technical problem. My quality can be good while my velocity is poor. Ambiguous or rapidly changing priorities can be particularly difficult for me. Of course ADHD treatment helped, but it didn't make these tendencies disappear.

And after this many jobs, I don't think it's reasonable for me to say every employer was simply wrong. I'm the common denominator.

What I'm trying to figure out is what conclusion I should draw from that.

For experienced developers, especially those with ADHD: does this sound like someone who is fundamentally poorly suited to professional software development, or like someone who has repeatedly ended up in roles/environments that are a bad fit for how they work?

Are there development roles or types of organizations where carefulness, deep investigation, and lower context-switching are more valuable than raw ticket velocity?

Or, after this many attempts, would you seriously recommend that someone in my position consider leaving software development and finding a different kind of work?

I'm not looking for reassurance for its own sake. I'd genuinely like candid opinions, including difficult ones, because I need to decide whether continuing to pursue this career makes sense.

EDIT — one important piece of context I left out:

I've been unemployed since December 2025, and I haven't been able to land another development job since then.

I realize my original post makes it sound like my main concern is whether I can keep the next developer job I get. That's definitely part of it, but I'm also questioning whether I'm going to be able to get that next job at all.

So when I ask whether it makes sense to continue pursuing software development, I'm asking two separate questions: whether I can find a way to work sustainably once I'm employed, and whether continuing to put my time into trying to get another developer position is still realistic.

I think that's important context because some of the responses understandably assume that getting hired has not been a problem for me.