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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

This. I had this long standing dispute that I just never had the energy to look up what needed to be done to resolve it. I just told it to ChatGPT and it generated everything -- including the emails I needed to send and who to send them to. Two weeks later and it was taken care of. I had sat on it for literally 3 months until then.

If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.

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I have ADHD and it almost acts as a body double for me, which I find to be incredibly helpful to get things done.

GPT-4 got me seriously considering making a product for school-age kids w/ ADHD. It’d be a physical device (like a StarTrek communicator). That listens during your day and keeps track of a) things you say that you’ll do or b) tasks that other people ask you to do. Then it compiles those tasks and attempts to be basically a secretary. It can also plug into your email, texts & school assignments.

The privacy implications are horrifying. But if done right, you’re taking about a kind of digital ‘executive function’ that could help a lot of kids that struggle with things like prioritization and time blindness.

We're not too far away from a smaller LLM that could be run locally that could do this, which would make it more privacy friendly. The plugging into my email seems like a great way to begin or complete a lethal trifecta and I don't have a good solution there, though.

Every iPhone, iPad, and Mac that either ships with or is upgraded to iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 has a 3-billion parameter LLM that’s available to developers and operates on-device. Mail, Notes, Reminders are already integrated.[1]

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286

I might be out of the loop, but if anyone else is confused about the version number:

> If you were expecting iOS 19 after iOS 18, you might be a little surprised to see Apple jump to iOS 26, but the new number reflects the 2025-2026 release season for the software update.

https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/ios-26/

Sure, the implications are horrifying, but tech companies have proven themselves quite trustworthy over the past few decades, so I'm sure it'd be fine.

As someone with ADHD, I say: Please don't build this.

It’s not just for people with ADHD. Someone will build this very soon and people will use it a lot. Hopefully Apple builds it because I guess I trust them a little more.

Look, the Torment Nexus has great potential, okay? The investors love it!

It could be built to use local models completely.

Open source transcription models are already good enough to do this, and with good context engineering, the base models might be good enough, too.

It wouldn't be trivial to implement, but I think it's possible already.

This is what I wanted to build the day chat gpt came out. Except being unable to guarantee the output due to hallucinations drove me into figuring out evals, and then the dream died due to complexity.

Marshall MacLuhan said something to the effect that every new communication technology results in a sort of self-amputation of that same faculty in the individual person.

I was diagnosed with ADHD and my interpretation of that diagnoses was not "I need something to take over this functionality for me," but "I need to develop this functionality so that I can function as a better version of myself or to fight against a system which is not oriented towards human dignity but some other end."

I guess I am reluctant to replace the unique faculties of individual children with a generic faculty approved by and concordant with the requirements of the larger society. How dismal to replace the unique aspects of children's minds with a cookie cutter prosthetic meant to integrate nicely into our bullshit hell world. Very dismal.

Same, I created a todo list with a simple MCP and it's been game changing, just being able to talk/discuss with my todo list somehow seems to keep me coming back to it rather than after 3 weeks it just becoming a sterile and abandoned list of random things

This is the first actual use case I’ve heard of that made sense for me. I’m going to try this.

Yes, it's also useful against writer's block. (Which might be a subset of ADHD, I don't know?)

For many people, it's easier to improve a bad first version of a piece of writing than to start from scratch. Even current mediocre LLM are great at writing bad first drafts.

> Even current mediocre LLM are great at writing bad first drafts.

Anyone is great at creating a bad first draft. You don’t need help to create something bad, that’s why that’s a common tip. Dan Harmon is constantly hammering on that advice for writer’s block: “prove you’re a bad writer”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVqYUaUO1cQ

If you get an LLM to write a first draft for you, it’ll be full of ideas which aren’t yours which will condition your writing.

Little plot twist, you can pitch an LLM an idea for a scene, then tell it to interrogate you thoroughly for the details, then tell it to generate a clean, tight draft optimized for efficient use of language and readability, and you basically get your own ideas back but with a lot of the boring parts of writing already done.

Making your writing itself boring and the same as everyone’s who used that technique, transforming it into something no one will want to read anyway.

You pretty much jumped to the most negative possible interpretation. You think there isn't an editing process?

There is no editing process during a first draft, no. That’s the whole point of a draft, it’s a separate process from revisions and editing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_(writing)

Were you trying to be intentionally obtuse? What was your goal with that reply? Are you trying to troll?

`Anyone is great at creating a bad first draft`

Famously not so! Writer's block is real!

The rest of the paragraph and the link address exactly that.

There might be techniques that help overcome writer's block, sure. But it's still a real problem.

Getting an LLM to produce a not-so-bad first draft is just another technique.

Exactly. Agentic LLMs are amazing for people who suffer from chronic akrasia.

OH wow, a word to describe me

The latin word for that is "incontinentia".

Those are exactly the people who shouldn’t use these tools. They’ll be sucked in to whatever bullshit the LLM peddles them and become unable to leave.

As long as it's helping them be productive, I don't really see an issue with that. Going from doing nothing to doing something is a net boost.

But it’s not helping them “be productive” (which is a horrible metric anyway, life is not about productivity above everything else), it’s sucking their lives and severing their relationships and connection to the real world.

https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

https://archive.is/26aHF

Those are chatbots and those issues are not akrasia. We're talking about very different things in multiple dimensions.

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