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I'm in a similar situation is you are, having ADHD, and my observations have been similar. I've been more hestiant to use AI at all for a while at the beginning but even now I only ever use it for one thing at a time. It helps me tremendously with the things I want to have done but not do - find out who clutters my home directory, build a small DMS plugin for local models, stuff like that. But even if I work on a bigger task and idea, it's mostly one thing I use it for at a time.

Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.

I don’t know, there may be something to this. I shared this post with another ADHD friend of mine and he also resonated with your and my experience, not the OP’s.

Now I want to do a study!

I wonder if the extremely fast dopamine hits of LLM use trigger the same sort of dopaminergic response that ADHD does when faced with a stimulus? If so, are we simply better at dealing with those swings, since we’ve literally dealt with them our entire lives?

I’m also interested in a study as I also have ADHD and this is also my work loop. I tend to cut up and serialise rather than parallelise. I can not deal with the degree of context switching described in this blog post. I’d have felt frayed within two weeks.

We definitely need a study - this all resonates with me.

My complete guess is there's a level of bravado or over-confidence about it.

It's obviously massively generalising, but I'd say someone without ADHD is more likely to feel like the number of tasks they can do at once is only limited by pesky things like physics and time, and LLMs "solve" this by allowing them to do more at once.

A bit like when a good manager takes on more and more reports and their ability to manage the larger team goes completely to shit, but without the useful feedback loop of the grumpy, mismanaged team.

I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD but this comment hits home. I also struggle to juggle multiple tasks and I’ve had to build a lot of personal strategies to be productive at my job. Otherwise I’d stay scatterbrained and never get anything done.

Things like drawing small defined boundaries, understanding where and how to delegate, and forcing myself to “hyperfocus” on 1-2 tasks at once. My strategy with building revolves around offloading mental context as fast as possible and into sequential, modular pieces. It’s made me a much better systems thinker. However, because of that I also don’t really see the point in running more than 1-2 coding agents at once. Others I work with don’t relate and are trying to parallelize as much as they can.

Part of me is concerned that this way of thinking isn’t compatible with the new wave of agentic SWE and these skills will become outdated. Or maybe it’s actually all converging back and is more valuable than ever.

I honestly think it’s the latter. OP’s post is literally evidence of that. The “open twelve agents” is not only unsustainable (and leads to burnout) but fundamentally incompatible with building robust software. Sure, you can have agents fight it out, but at what mental (and actual cash) cost, and to what benefit?

I have not found myself less productive than my peers, but I have found myself less scattered across a bunch of different things. I do not think this is worse.

Also, consider reading about and/or getting tested for ADHD. You may not have it, of course, but I was diagnosed at 33 and it changed my life. Not because of medication (though I did that for about a year and a half, with success) but for a dozen other reasons, including being able to accept parts of myself rather than fight them, recognize (and reinforce) the coping mechanisms I’d built, recognize the ways in which it made me literally better than other people at certain things (some refer to ADHD being a “superpower” which it can definitely feel like at times), etc.

If you haven’t read Mark Suster’s posts about his experience with ADHD, read them - there are 3. If it resonates, consider talking to someone.

My email is in my profile; I’m happy to chat if you ever want. :)

Really appreciate the reply :) I’ve read a ton on ADHD and pretty suspect that I do have it, but didn’t want to claim anything before going through a proper diagnosis (which I’ll get to, eventually!). I just ordered “Delivered from Distraction” which was recommended by Mark Suster. I’ll shoot you an email when I’m through it!

What I’m trying to solve right now is how to communicate this intuition with colleagues and management. It feels like fighting against the current and near impossible with the levels of hype. Hoping that we as an industry make this realization soon

> 1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without Ai.

Funnily enough this is my biggest problem when using AI. The time it spends "thinking" is time I'm more likely to get distracted and switch to another window.

And I use the term thinking liberally, because a lot of the time it's just wasting time. Sometimes I ask it to edit a file, it does, and then it thinks for 2 or 3 minutes afterwards. During that time I've verified the edit, committed it, opened a pull request and sometimes even merged before it finishes thinking about that edit. What was it thinking about during that time?

I have many projects going, many tmux sessions, but I also found I don't resonate with the post either. Yes, there are times I use AI and it doesn't go anywhere and wasn't necessary but I don't think I can always know that ahead of time. The point is the overall pattern and the actual of useful work.

I am much more able to use fragmented bits of time now. Whereas before if I had 20 minutes here and there I would not be able to even read code or notes in order to get context enough to make a change let alone do real work.

I suspect personality matters. Often in discussions with AI or anyone I tend to take opiate position and constantly challenge and dig in. I don't go with the flow. With people this can be problematic. With AI it merely takes more time but probably a avoids some pitfalls.

Yeah. I dont have ADHD, but doing many tasks at once is a great way for me to lower my own attention span, make my own attentiveness worst. It is as if doing multiple tasks at once was a great way to put non-ADHD brain into temporary adhd-lite state. (Temporary, because when I stop multitasking, it reverses back over time).

Pre-AI, I worked on projects where people tended to multitask and juggle many tasks at once. They felt productive, they worked a lot and hard and felt they are treated unfairly when outsiders complained about slow speed. Except that, their overall speed was extremely slow, really.

Probably because with fewer tabs, you actually get to do the deeper thinking that you enjoy? With more, you're constrained to quickly converging on the best way to keep the plate spinning

Yeah, I think that’s true, but that isn’t really my question. My question is why this seems easier and more natural for people with ADHD to do than people without.

(That is also an unproven statement, obviously, but that’s what I’d want to study/test)

I don’t have ADHD and also focus on 1 or 2 tabs, usually one is focused on the coding task I’m doing and the other on some research I need for planning future work.

People who keep dozens of agent plates spinning all the time must have a broken understanding of productivity where they think more code = better regardless if anyone needed the code. In the old days engineers burned out when they got a promotion and thought they now need to write more code to compensate, maybe burnout in the agentic age looks different.

This is a great point. I hadn’t considered the analogy to “more lines of code”