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Comment by jasoncurry | Hacker News Reader

Hi, we just started building a few weeks ago but have about 700 beta users. We are building the most effective specialized AI for ADHD. We're in private beta but feel free to see our site that links to our Chrome extension and try it out if it sounds like something you need.

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> Hi, we just started building a few weeks ago but have about 700 beta users. We are building the most effective specialized AI for ADHD.

I'm sorry, but that statement just irks me. If you're only a few weeks into development, how can you honestly say what you're making will be the "most effective specialized AI for ADHD"? It's an unrealized aspiration stated as an inevitability. I don't think stating that you're "trying to build" or you're "goal is to build" would be so irksome.

>I’m sorry

No, don’t be sorry. The behavior displayed by this product and its creator can be at best described as offensive hubris, or more accurately I would describe the behavior as disgusting.

Ironically, that is the very reason I set out to create Comigo, because I think productivity tools as a solution for ADHD are BS. Especially given the massive cognitive overload the user interfaces create and the tedious process for creating tasks, organizing, etc, which are very difficult for people with ADHD.

BUT, point taken on how I am presenting the product. Clearly I need to rethink that and will.

It smells like how crypto bros used to refer to "building web 3.0"

Ouch, OK, I need to work on how I present this! Harsh but telling feedback. Seriously, thank you.

Hi there, I'm the founder! I didn't catch all these comments right away!

I understand your point, and I truly believe in our mission. I'm driven by my own experiences with ADHD, along with my family's journey, I'm committed to making a real difference. We have a very strong team with relevant advanced degrees, 30 published AI papers, and meaningful collaborations in healthcare.

We moved quickly with a proof of concept in just a week, and we're in our 16th iteration now of what you could call and MVP—embracing Reid Hoffman's advice that launching early is key. And regarding my chosen semantics, I live by words of Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try!"

I wanted to use this but the privacy policy doesn’t give me much confidence. Are you going to be storing my prompts (and then later using it for training)? Medical data, especially mental health data, is pretty sensitive.

For something like this the privacy policy should be rock solid first, product mvp second. The brevity of the one you have in place seems like you haven't done any work on gdpr / ccpa, etc.

If the profit model requires a loose privacy policy then let me pay for an airtight one. This seems like the needed model for anything in this realm ongoing.

Privacy and regulatory compliance are first and foremost before we publicly launch. We are having a discussion with a notable privacy scholar on joining us as an advisor. Any sharing of data will be optional, although hopefully some people will share (anonymously and encrypted) prompts, inputs, interactions, etc because it would be extremely useful for fine-tuning our model with collective and individual user data, in addition to sources of clinically validated data, to better help.

Cool.

1. What factors in ADHD is this product supposed to treat? 2. How are you measuring the effectiveness of this tool? 3. What other tools for ADHD are you comparing against? 4. How do you manage HIPAA protections? What physical, network, and process security measures are you using?

I mean... It sounds like a cool idea, but could you explain what it is and how it works? The website is remarkably sparse, on mobile at least.

What are the cognitive assessments, and what normative data set do they use?

"we just started building a few weeks ago"

So, you've put "a few weeks" of work into your project, but nevertheless already feel confident that you can market it as a medical treatment. Why?

Fair point. We have been working on this for several months in what I would call and academic manner. And for years prior in other experimental ways to see what does and does not work. And some on our team have experience with other mental health disorders such as PTSD in a medical college lead environment. However, I will be mindful of positioning Comigo as a medical treatment until further due diligence into the FDA approval process as a medical device (in our case software, but that's how they categorize it).

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