> ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
That’s an interesting framing. I’m not sure I agree with your strong conclusion but that’s mostly because I think there’s a second axis about maintenance – you can make a grand strategy game in a couple months but it’s harder to make it balanced, fun, and to keep shipping updates which players like. A prototype or hobby experiment doesn’t have that problem nearly as much and I think that’s where we see such bimodal reactions where some people think it’s a huge productivity boost and others see modest or even negative results.
I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
The contest you described (people with ADHD vs. autism) would have an enormously negative effect. But there are reasons to think it's unlikely. FWIW at least 25% of ADHD adults manifest autistic traits. Hardly surprising, clinicians regard overlapping neurodevelopmental disorders as the rule and not the exception.
An online community works when participants learn and share knowledge gained. Contests, with self or others, disrupt learning and sharing, hence by definition constitute "bad behavior". If it exists, the hyperwar you allude to will harm communities more than all LLMs combined could do.
I'm pretty skeptical of people who are ADHD and claim to be getting boosted by LLMs.
It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there
I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical of people who claim to both be good at multi-tasking and also have ADHD. My experience with ADHD is that multi -tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
> ... multi-tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
Interesting point of view from one who's been there. Intuitively the comment makes a lot of sense.
In a way human multitasking resembles how single-threaded computer programs work. That is, we focus on one task at a time but tasks can be interleaved to give an illusion of doing several tasks at the same time. Managing several tasks requires remembering the next step to do when leaving one task to attend to another.
That suggests ADHD people lose track of where they left off when performing several tasks. Distraction plays a role, but I think problematic working memory is the major issue. Among ADHD researchers there's a saying, "people with ADHD know what to do but don't do what they know." ADHD task performance may improve with proper treatment.
For me it's a dopamine machine. I get my doses of lacking dopamine from completing things.
Agents let me complete things in parallel all the time.
They also let me build tools that manage all the attention-grabbing things in my life. Something I've been meaning to do "tomorrow" for a good decade.
I've already built custom notification tools for all the "I'll just quickly check hn/lobste.rs/tildes/whatever" so that they'll tell me if there's something actionable, closing down the rabbit hole for me. My email is pre-filtered by an agent that pings me if there's something urgent. My IRC client is custom-built for the specific way I use it etc etc.
No, it felt too invasive and creepy so I abandoned the idea. Or my lack of follow-through is a sign that I’m actually on the other side of the “war”. Reader decides! But suffice it to say that it was, to me, a significant trend especially around the “Claude Code moment” back in February/March is this year.
Autism should not be framed as being "opposted" to ADHD. The correct axis is "Autistic" (Neurosis) as opposed to Psychosis. Opposite poles but with a little bit of horseshoe theory dynamics
> This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
I still do start from bottom up to refactor everything into workspace members and this way, parallelism is way easier
> LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
Not just forest. LLMs reward seeing structures and designs, and it still requires a lot of creativity to design it well. I have to do a lot of architect works for that, like package layout, testing strategies (BDD vs TDD vs E2E), setting up access to platforms and digging out what strategies to apply...etc.
> People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Trees like demonstrations and example code are even more important. This is because those are literally post-training materials for the LLMs
> Specialists will be fed to the model weights
I don't think so. New labor laws are certainly going to be introduced by the politicans to tackle this.
> generalists will inherit the world.
Now the problem is how far do you want to stretch the systemic thinking, and you also get burned out quicker.
Funny you should mention autism. I'm of the belief that if I really wanted to, my autism could help me become a very effective AI-assisted programmer, because autistic communication traits that actual humans find annoying (and which most people hence train out of themselves), like infodumping and using precise language, are things AI actually loves and produces better results with.
But I don't want to use AI to code, in large part because I iterate on ideas by working directly with code. Attempting to program through an LLM intermediary becomes like attempting to eat using soft silicone chopsticks.
> ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
That’s an interesting framing. I’m not sure I agree with your strong conclusion but that’s mostly because I think there’s a second axis about maintenance – you can make a grand strategy game in a couple months but it’s harder to make it balanced, fun, and to keep shipping updates which players like. A prototype or hobby experiment doesn’t have that problem nearly as much and I think that’s where we see such bimodal reactions where some people think it’s a huge productivity boost and others see modest or even negative results.
I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
The contest you described (people with ADHD vs. autism) would have an enormously negative effect. But there are reasons to think it's unlikely. FWIW at least 25% of ADHD adults manifest autistic traits. Hardly surprising, clinicians regard overlapping neurodevelopmental disorders as the rule and not the exception.
An online community works when participants learn and share knowledge gained. Contests, with self or others, disrupt learning and sharing, hence by definition constitute "bad behavior". If it exists, the hyperwar you allude to will harm communities more than all LLMs combined could do.
I'm pretty skeptical of people who are ADHD and claim to be getting boosted by LLMs.
It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there
I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical of people who claim to both be good at multi-tasking and also have ADHD. My experience with ADHD is that multi -tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
> ... multi-tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
Interesting point of view from one who's been there. Intuitively the comment makes a lot of sense.
In a way human multitasking resembles how single-threaded computer programs work. That is, we focus on one task at a time but tasks can be interleaved to give an illusion of doing several tasks at the same time. Managing several tasks requires remembering the next step to do when leaving one task to attend to another.
That suggests ADHD people lose track of where they left off when performing several tasks. Distraction plays a role, but I think problematic working memory is the major issue. Among ADHD researchers there's a saying, "people with ADHD know what to do but don't do what they know." ADHD task performance may improve with proper treatment.
7 replies →
For me it's a dopamine machine. I get my doses of lacking dopamine from completing things.
Agents let me complete things in parallel all the time.
They also let me build tools that manage all the attention-grabbing things in my life. Something I've been meaning to do "tomorrow" for a good decade.
I've already built custom notification tools for all the "I'll just quickly check hn/lobste.rs/tildes/whatever" so that they'll tell me if there's something actionable, closing down the rabbit hole for me. My email is pre-filtered by an agent that pings me if there's something urgent. My IRC client is custom-built for the specific way I use it etc etc.
>At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
Care to share it?
No, it felt too invasive and creepy so I abandoned the idea. Or my lack of follow-through is a sign that I’m actually on the other side of the “war”. Reader decides! But suffice it to say that it was, to me, a significant trend especially around the “Claude Code moment” back in February/March is this year.
Autism should not be framed as being "opposted" to ADHD. The correct axis is "Autistic" (Neurosis) as opposed to Psychosis. Opposite poles but with a little bit of horseshoe theory dynamics
> This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
I still do start from bottom up to refactor everything into workspace members and this way, parallelism is way easier
> LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
Not just forest. LLMs reward seeing structures and designs, and it still requires a lot of creativity to design it well. I have to do a lot of architect works for that, like package layout, testing strategies (BDD vs TDD vs E2E), setting up access to platforms and digging out what strategies to apply...etc.
> People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Trees like demonstrations and example code are even more important. This is because those are literally post-training materials for the LLMs
> Specialists will be fed to the model weights
I don't think so. New labor laws are certainly going to be introduced by the politicans to tackle this.
> generalists will inherit the world.
Now the problem is how far do you want to stretch the systemic thinking, and you also get burned out quicker.
Funny you should mention autism. I'm of the belief that if I really wanted to, my autism could help me become a very effective AI-assisted programmer, because autistic communication traits that actual humans find annoying (and which most people hence train out of themselves), like infodumping and using precise language, are things AI actually loves and produces better results with.
But I don't want to use AI to code, in large part because I iterate on ideas by working directly with code. Attempting to program through an LLM intermediary becomes like attempting to eat using soft silicone chopsticks.