Comment by klipklop
2 days ago
>I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort. >Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!
I agree and I feel that having LLM's do boilerplate type stuff is fantastic for ADD people. The dopamine hit you get making tremendous progress before you get utterly bored is nice. The thing that ADD/ADHD people are the WORST at is finishing projects. LLM will help them once the thrill of prototyping a green-field project is over.
Seconding this. My work has had the same problem - by the time I've got things all hooked up, figured out the complicated stuff - my brain (and body) clock out and I have to drag myself through hell to get to 100%. Even with ADHD stimulant medication. It didn't make it emotionally easier, just _possible_ lol.
LLMs, particularly Claude 4 and now GPT-5 are fantastic at working through these todo lists of tiny details. Perfectionism + ADHD not a fun combo, but it's way more bearable. It will only get better.
We have a huge moat in front of us of ever-more interesting tasks as LLMs race to pick up the pieces. I've never been more excited about the future of tech
Same here, especially for making bash scripts or lots of if this if that with logging type stuff, error handling etc..
Oh and also, from what I know, ADHD and perfectionism is a very common combination, I'm not sure if everyone has that but I've heard it's the case for many with ADD. Same with "standards" being extremely high for everything
I'm kind of in this cohort. While in the groove, yea, things fly but, inevitably, my interest wanes. Either something too tedious, something too hard (or just a lot of work). Or, just something shinier shows up.
Bunch of 80% projects with, as you mentioned, the interesting parts finished (sorta -- you see the line at the end of the tunnel, it's bright, just don't bother finishing the journey).
However, at the same time, there's conflict.
Consider (one of) my current projects, I did the whole back end. I had ChatGPT help me stand up a web front end for it. I am not a "web person". GUIs and what not are a REAL struggle for me because on the one hand, I don't care how things look, but, on the other, "boy that sure looks better". But getting from "functional" to "looks better" is a bottomless chasm of yak shaving, bike shedding improvements. I'm even bad at copying styles.
My initial UI was time invested getting my UI to work, ugly as it was, with guidance from ChatGPT. Which means it gave me ways to do things, but mostly I coded up the actual work -- even if it was blindly typing it in vs just raw cut and paste. I understood how things were working, what it was doing, etc.
But then, I just got tired of it, and "this needs to be Better". So, I grabbed Claude and let it have its way.
And, its better! it certainly looks better, more features. It's head and shoulders better.
Claude wrote 2-3000 lines of javascript. In, like, 45m. It was very fast, very responsive. One thing Claude knows is boiler plate JS Web stuff. And the code looks OK to me. Imperfect, but absolutely functional.
But, I have zero investment in the code. No "ownership", certainly no pride. You know that little hit you get when you get Something Right, and it Works? None of that. Its amazing, its useful, its just not mine. And that's really weird.
I've been striving to finish projects, and, yea, for me, that's really hard. There is just SO MUCH necessary to ship. AI may be able to help polish stuff up, we'll see as I move forward. If nothing else it may help gathering up lists of stuff I miss to do.
Ironically, I find greenfield projects the least stimulating and the most rote, aside from thinking about system design.
I've always much preferred figuring out how to improve or build on existing messy systems and codebases, which is certainly aided by LLMs for big refactoring type stuff, but to be successful at it requires thinking about how some component of a system is already used and the complexity of that. Lots of edge cases and nuances, people problems, relative conservativeness.
Looks like the definition of boilerplate will continue to shift up the chain