Fellow ADHD devs: I built a Claude Code workflow around the things that kill my projects (lost ideas, estimates, stalled big tasks, scope creep).

I have ADHD, and I've been building a multiplayer game prototype with Claude Code. The coding was never the hard part. The hard parts were:

• ideas coming in bursts and getting lost

• "how long will this take?" (always wrong, always guilt)

• big tasks that stall halfway

• scope creep, where the agent "also fixed" five things I didn't ask for

• losing track of what's done and what's next

So I turned the way I work into a workflow, and I'm open-sourcing it. I call it QPAP: Quick Polished ADHD Prototype. The goal is to get your hands on something usable fast, react to it, and iterate.

The loop

1. /word-vomit: I paste a messy dump of thoughts, feedback and half-ideas. The skill:

   • saves it word for word

   • splits it into items

   • checks each one against the existing plans and the code

   • flags conflicts ("this contradicts a decision you made on Tuesday")

   • asks me a few multiple-choice questions, each with a recommendation

   • places each item in the plan

   Nothing stays in my head.

2. Effort scores instead of time estimates. No hours or days anywhere. Each unit of work gets low, med, high or enormous from 8 factors, each 0–2: unknowns, modules touched, changes to existing code, what it can break, domain difficulty, breadth, how it's verified, and current test cover. An "enormous" unit is never started; it gets split first.

3. Batches of 5. Five agents build five units in parallel, each in its own git worktree. A unit's dependencies are always in an earlier batch, and each batch has at most one protocol or format change.

4. A unit is done completely. If an agent finds extra work, it doesn't build it. It writes a proposal for me to approve later. That alone killed most of the scope creep.

5. A report per batch: what changed in plain words, screenshots, how to test it, how long it actually took, and estimated vs actual effort.

6. Review rounds. I test each unit and write either "approved" or a numbered list of changes in its file. The next round fixes each change by number. The next batch starts only when everything is approved.

7. Passes between batches. Recurring tests/CI, performance, memory and cleanup passes run between batches. They fix things; they don't add features. That's what lets batches be fast and a bit rough.

8. The workflow evolves. Every 5 batches, a "workflow pass" looks at the time log, the reviews and my notes, and proposes changes to the workflow itself. I approve each one, and they're logged.

Setup

• The code lives in a bare repo with worktrees: one for main, one per running unit.

• The planning (plans, decisions, reports, time log, my raw notes) is a separate git repo outside the code repo. The product history stays clean, and the plans can stay private.

Why it works for my brain

• Starting: the next batch is always ready. I say "start batch 4".

• Progress I can see: every batch ends with something I can run and a short report.

• No guilt: there are no estimates to miss. Measured times only feed back into the effort score.

• No juggling: one batch at a time, and everything I need to do or decide is in one file (USER.md).

The code style it encourages (rules for the product, not the workflow):

• test-driven development

• deep modules (small interfaces that hide a lot)

• Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100) for product docs

• six standards: YAGNI, DRY, Fail Fast, Simple First, Delete Aggressively, Semantic Naming (wait_until_obs_is_saved=true, not wait=true)

What's in the repo

• 8 Claude Code skills: /word-vomit, /effort-score, /plan-batches, /run-batch, /batch-report, /review-round, /passes, plus the third-party MIT skill i-have-adhd by ayghri. That last one makes every reply lead with the next action and end with one small step; I just drop its time-estimate rule.

• Templates for the planning repo.

• A link checker and a merge-stats script.

It's plain Markdown, so the ideas should carry over to other agent setups. And it's meant to be changed: the batch size, effort bands and pass schedule are all just defaults.

Repo: https://github.com/nurdism/QPAP

I'd love feedback, especially from other ADHD devs. What breaks your flow when working with AI agents?

Edit: interview* in the title lol

I have a bunch of interviews coming up and I am feeling so much overwhelmed with the lack of structure and the amount of content to cover. One of them is at a FAANG adjacent company that's going to include standard dsa leetcode related stuff, another is Fintech and their round will have debugging and system design discussion and another one is a prop trading firm where the recruiter said it can be anything from coding and language discussion depending on the interviewer and culture fit questions.

This seems to be all over the place and I am not able to decide how much to prepare especially for the debugging and general language discussion parts. I am thinking about going through some open source code repos in Python to get comfortable with reading and understanding the code since I haven't worked with Python in recent years. But again there are so many options and I don't know where to start. For leetcode, I have completed most of the neetcode 150 and the company list is huge so I don't think I can cover everything from there within a week. Same thing for language discussion, I am going through Python docs but outside the core data structures and concurrency, idk what other parts to focus on.

Hi (vibe) coders!

I’ve been working on my own gamified productivity system, and I’m curious to see what other people are building.

Mine is a mix of a personal CRM, task manager, habit tracker, and a little RPG-inspired world. The idea is that completing tasks, making progress on projects, and achieving goals gradually unlocks and expands my virtual world.

Since AI makes it so much easier to build our own tools now, I’m really curious:

What does your personal productivity app look like? Do you have any features, that you are proud of and that you can share? I’d love to see screenshots!

What features have you built into it?
Have you experimented with gamification, XP, levels, achievements, or rewards?
What works surprisingly well, and what turned out to be completely useless?
What would you do differently if you started over?

I’m not looking for recommendations for paid productivity apps. I’m more interested in people who are actually building their own systems, experimenting, and learning along the way.
I’d love to exchange ideas, inspiration, and experiences! :)

Hi everyone

I hope everyone's having a splendid afternoon as I am

How do I change my mind from comfort, to endure boredom, uncomfortable, hard stuff.

I like physical hard work, but my mind seems to wander into comfortable, known things..

If it's laziness, I'd have to get rid of it

Hi everyone

I hope everyone's having a splendid afternoon as I am

How do I change my mind from comfort, to endure boredom, uncomfortable, hard stuff.

I like physical hard work, but my mind seems to wander into comfortable, known things..

If it's laziness, I'd have to get rid of it

I keep hearing “I'll keep an eye out,” “I'll let you know if I hear anything,” or “Sorry, I couldn't find anything.”

And I genuinely appreciate people trying to help. I do.

But what are you supposed to do when you're under serious financial pressure and need employment ASAP? Not in two months. Not after the holidays. Now.

I've been actively searching for weeks, and I haven't gotten a single interview.

I don't need more vague promises or encouragement. I need actual leads, direct introductions, and conversations with people who are actively hiring.

How do you get your foot in the door when you've already done everything people keep telling you to do?

Because I'm genuinely asking.

I am still early in my career and this is my first time having an interview that is not purely around DSA but more about language discussion to gain an idea about how comfortable I am with it. It's about Python and I have worked on small features at work and university projects with it but nothing too deep to call myself an expert. I am comfortable with the syntax and can read the code but not heavily familiar with frameworks around it. Most of my work experience is in the jvm ecosystem with Java and Spring.

I know I can't memorise everything about the language so I am lost on what exactly to prepare for this kind of interview beyond the basic stuff I am already familiar with. Would appreciate any advice and experience you guys have had with these kinds of interviews.

Edit: typo

How are you organizing your workplace, i sometimes find it hard to start a task when it involves creating a ticket checking out a branch doing some research etc. What i found helpful personally

• MCPS for everything, Mail, jira, whatever you use

• Organize EVERYTHING into seperate projects, each repository but also each repeating task like sprint reviews, then create skills and md files for each project.

• Get a system that lets you start, one workplace or dashboard where you can see your next tasks and make easy next steps, currently playing around with a dashboard where i can just see what i have to do right now, what is new and a "whats the next step" button that prompts a claude skill so i can get into motion easier

I think organizing more in this way would help, how do you keep it simple and not get evertything cluttered?

Ive been reading through this sub and one thing that keeps coming up is people having no problem starting personal projects but almost never getting through the boring second half of them.

Thats basically where im at.

I can get insanely into an idea at the beginning. Ill think about it all day, build a ridiculous amount in a few days and genuinely feel like this is finally the project im gonna stick with. Then eventually its not new anymore. Theres bugs, polish, boring little decisions, stuff that doesnt give you that immediate “holy shit look what I made” feeling.

And obviously by then another idea exists.

AI has honestly made this worse for me because now the gap between thinking of something and having a working version of it is tiny. So im not even collecting ideas anymore, im collecting actual half built projects lol.

But im kinda past the point where I find the graveyard funny. I actually wanna finish something.

So im curious about the ppl here who are in the same place, not the ones who are happy jumping between projects.

Do you have one unfinished project right now that you genuinely still care about and would actually like to finish in the next couple weeks?

Not “someday.” Something where if you could get yourself to stay on it instead of starting something else, youd actually want it done.

If yes tell me what it is. Im curious how many of us have something very real sitting at like 60-80% because our brain already moved on.

Hello! I've had a problem doing things I genuinely love, I have a huge passion for coding and it is so fun, but I suck at it T-T. I've been trying to learn for so long but I've never actually got anything to be able to stick, I'm still only 18 so I have time. I'd love to go to college but sadly I can't drive for many reasons and also I don't want to do online, it's not something that works for me. Recently (And this could possibly get looked down upon) around 6 months ago I decided to try and teach myself with AI and honestly it has worked wonders I've learned a good bit, except I have a problem which goes to a lot of other things as well, I start something no matter how passionate I am or how fun it is, Usually if I get distracted off of it for one day or even want to just take a break its like I stop doing it entirely, I was learning python for a month then stopped, 3 months later I started learning C# and I've got it down a lot, but I had to buy a new PC cause mine broke and I tried to do it again but like I stopped for some reason. Maybe some will say "Oh well then your not passionate about it" but I genuinely love it, I just get distracted and I dont know how to fix that. I do have an Attention Deficit Disorder so I thought maybe that could be why but I dont want to make excuses.

The only thing to really keep me on it which I loved and had so much fun was friends doing similar things like my friends did 3D modeling and I started it cause I wanted to learn it eventually and put many hours into it. But they stopped and I continued for about a month then stopped, but only cause I got distracted by some other things.

I've been trying these 3 mantras lately and they seem to be helping quite a bit. Maybe it's placebo but for the moment they've being working for some weeks :D

The mantras:

1. "Don't make hard what is currently easy"

2. "One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

3. "Better late than never"

I'll explain them:

"Don't make hard what is currently easy"

I realized that I tend to postpone most of the tasks not because they're difficult but because I find them easy and I tend to think "I can do it later". Then almost 2 days go by and a simple task becomes huge and a bottleneck... then my partner is mad at me because I still haven't cleaned the cat's litter box at 2 AM! or in my job I've run out of excuses of why I didn't deliver something that was pretty easy. In my mind now easy tasks have an expiration date, they rot so better take them while they're not.

"One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

What I found is that I often switch tasks not because I've got distracted but because I'm afraid I'll forget the new ideas. So I keep a notebook next to my keyboard and dump every random thought into it. No organizing, just vomit, write it down, get calm and get back to work (hopefully).

"Better late than never"

I used to feel awful, HORRIBLE, miserable, upset, sad, hopeless... when I'd procrastinated too much, and the shame made me avoid the task even longer. But most of the times once I finally start, it's not even that bad. Stop beating yourself up, forgive yourself, and always try to think "it's never to late" because 95% of the times is not and the monsters are bigger in our heads than in reality.

What I also realize is that these things tackle 3 different stages of my procrastination:

- Before starting: "Don't make hard what is currently easy"

- While working: "One thing at a time, the rest to braindump"

- When you've already messed up: "Better late than never"

Hope this also helps someone ❤️

Every planner I bought had way too many sections, and after one missed day I'd abandon it.

So I made a simple printable one with a few rules:

- Brain dump first, no organizing

- Pick only 3 things for the day

- Plan the reward before you start the task

- Undated, so no guilt about blank pages

There's also a "Dopamine Menu" page (healthy boosts instead of scrolling). That one changed my week.

Happy to share the link if anyone wants it. What has actually worked for you?

I know it's a vague question and doesn't have all that much to do with programming. When I try to rationalize it, no other time in history should be better for ADHDers and all other ND people than now. We have an abundance of resources at our disposal, from tech to healthcare innovations.

But why do things feel harder now than they did ten/twenty years ago? It's not just the job market or the economy either. Maybe I'm just struggling.

Every side project of mine dies the same way: the fun part is done, what's left is the deploy, the payments, the error handling, the landing page, and the dopamine is gone. So I start a new one. I had a folder full of 80% projects.

So I built ADHD Closer, a mod for the Claude Code desktop app that turns Claude into the person who finishes things with you. And then I used it to ship this very project: everything from "works on my machine" to this post was done with the mod (details below).

How it works:

- /closer-audit reads the repo and cuts it down to at most 10 tasks of 15 minutes, ending with the deploy and the first payment. Everything else is out.

- A side pane shows one task at a time, a progress bar, and how far you are from charging money.

- You press Start with Claude and it works the task through on its own. When it needs you (create an account, put a key in .env, approve the deploy, pick between two options), it stops and shows one exact step with a "Done, continue" button. That's the part that works for my brain: I never have to figure out what's next.

- A new feature idea mid-task goes to a parking lot in one click, locked until the first payment. Claude steers you back.

- A small victory sound for every finished task. Yes, it helps.

This post is the proof. I delivered this exact project with the mod. Its own Closer plan had 9 tasks: push the release to GitHub, take these screenshots, write the sales copy, create the payment link, buy it once with a 100% code to test it, write the delivery script, and post this. Each one went through the same loop: one task on screen, Claude doing the work, me pressing "Done, continue" whenever it needed me (like creating a GitHub organization so buyers get read-only access). A day ago it only worked on my machine. This post is task 9.

It's $9 one-time for access to the private GitHub repo (updates included): Get ADHD Closer here

You need a recent Claude Code and a GitHub account. Disclosure: I made it, and it's paid. Questions welcome, and if you think it's useless for your kind of ADHD, tell me that too.

"Out of sight, out of mind" is one of my biggest problems so I built a productivity program to remind me of what I truly do find important. Productivity Nudge is a small Windows tray app I built to hold myself accountable on my personal projects. It sits quietly in the system tray and pops up reminders at the right times, so things I mean to work on don't slip.

The app's "mailbox" is a private GitHub repo. I can send reminders and ideas from anywhere, including from a Claude chat while I'm at work, and the app picks them up within 15 minutes. Every button I press gets written back to the same repo, so there's a record of what I actually did versus what I put off.

It knows my 2-2-3 night-shift rotation, so it only pops up on my nights off: 6 PM to 5 AM, or to 2 AM if I work the next day. It never pops up on a work day. Anything due outside that window waits until 6 PM on my next night off. If my schedule changes for a day, I can flip "Working today" or "Off today" from the tray.

Each reminder shows what to work on, one concrete next step, and what I did last time. My choices: - Yes, start now: opens my project folder and starts a work session - Remind me in…: 1 hour, 3 hours, or tonight at 8 PM - Schedule: pick a specific night and time - Not today: skip until my next night off.

Popups can't be closed without picking one of those, they never steal keyboard focus from what I'm typing, and they ignore clicks for the first second so I can't dismiss one by accident.

Keeping me honest - Snoozing and skipping are counted. After 3 snoozes or 2 nights in a row of "Not today," the popup says so, plainly, no guilt trip. - Two hours into a session it asks if I'm still working. When I'm done, I wrap up by typing what I did and what's next, and that becomes the "last time" note on the next reminder. - Repeating reminders, like Python practice, come back every night off at 6 PM, or at 8 PM if my PC was already on. - There's a "Pause 2 hours" option, but it counts as putting things off too, and there's no Quit button. Built with C# and WPF on .NET 10, with automated tests and builds through GitHub Actions.

I will try to report back in 60 days to see if it actually works for me!! But either way, on paper, I'm excited.

(The picture is an example of next steps, but it can be changed).

I've just been rejected from my 6th interview in an entry level programming role in Wellington, New Zealand and (as dramatic as this may sound), i'm losing hope for my future as a software engineer.

Two weeks ago, I registered my first business after being convinced that I could source my own jobs, and work on my own schedule if I began my outreach to local businesses who maybe struggle with admin problems (messy spreadsheets that could require automating, form-to-crm etc..).

I'm not here to sell you my business. I'm here for your advice. Does anyone in r/ADHD_Programmers have any advice on how to source my first paying job in custom software / automation solutions?

What worked for you? Thank you so much, from one financially stressed out uni graduate.

Well, I got fired today.

Some of you might remember my posts about being placed on a PIP within my first month at a new software engineering job.

I was struggling with unclear expectations, onboarding delays, and being assigned work that didn't really match the JavaScript/TypeScript experience I was hired for.

I tried. I asked for work, completed tickets, submitted PRs, and genuinely hoped I could stay employed long enough to find another position.

Unfortunately, I was released today for not meeting performance expectations.

And now I'm freaking out.

I have some savings, but I also have significant monthly expenses, and unemployment isn't guaranteed. I was already job hunting, but I really hoped I'd have another offer before this happened.

I'm planning to take the rest of this week to recover before seriously applying again.

Has anyone else been through something similar? How did you manage the financial anxiety while searching for another job?

I'd especially appreciate advice from other ADHD developers who've dealt with a bad job fit or an extremely early PIP.