Comment by carterschonwald

Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.

Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. It’s more like having a reliable way to make fire — so we stop obsessing over sparks and start focusing on building something more important.

Same here re: ADHD. It's been invaluable. A big project that would have been personally intractible is now easy - even if the LLM gives slightly wrong answers 20% of the time, the important thing is that it collapses the search space for what concepts or tools I need to look into and gives an overall structure to iterate on. I tend to use ChatGPT for the big planning/architectural conversation, and I find it's also very good at sample code; for code writing/editing, Copilot has been fantastic too, lately mostly using the Opus agent in my case. It's so nice being able to delegate some bullshit gruntwork to it while I either do something else or work on architecture in another window for a few minutes.

It certainly hasn't inhibited learning either. The most recent example is shaders. I started by having it just generate entire shaders based on descriptions, without really understanding the pipeline fully, and asking how to apply them in Unity. I've been generally familiar with Unity for over a decade but never really touched materials or shaders. The generated shaders were shockingly good and did what I asked, but over time I wanted to really fine tune some of the behavior and wound up with multiple passes, compute shaders, and a bunch of other cool stuff - and understanding it all on a deeper level as a result.

I can definitely relate to the abstract at least. While I am more productive now, and I am way more excited about working on longer term projects (especially by myself), I have found that the minutia is way more strenuous than it was before. I think that inhibits my ability to review what the LLM is producing.

I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD or anything but i also haven't been tested for it. It's something I have considered but I think it's pretty underdiagnosed in Spain.

Indeed, I feel like AI makes it less lonely to work, and for me, it's a net positive. It still has downsides for my focus, but that can be improved...

Can you elaborate on how you use AI for this? Do you do it for coding or for “everything?”

I am currently writing a paper and I am thinking exactly the same.

That must be how normal people feel.

Yeah, I'd say I'm thinking and doing way more.

One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year"

I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework.

I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things.

I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns.

Well, now it's easy.

"Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it"

And that's just the start.

I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one.

I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed.

Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky.

And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.

I feel the same. Do you think this is because the ADHD brain has so many ideas or is it the same for neuro-normal people?