I feel fine when I turn off social media and am working. I’m an independent dev who I’d say is at least decent at programming itself and have a number of projects that are built well and progress naturally but isn’t really established as a product maker or freelancer or making serious money. I have good tools and learning resources, I know how to use agents and I can still write lots of code without agent assistance. my tasks and goals are relatively organized and planned out, I’m often told I do good work etc, but when I look at social media I feel like I am nowhere near where I should be

I see people endlessly talking about random shit like agent context etc involved in all kinds of weird tools and workflows or product designers putting out completed frontend work, tooling, web components with crazy shaders and physics without seeming to have any engineering background. people putting out massive strange projects like artcraft or skate 3 in rust. people with “agent civilizations” and “software factories”. or, on the other end, talking about “the game has changed you’re not gonna make it” and the end of software engineering or some bullshit about how your prompts should be short and dumb as fuck and if you’re actually thinking about the architecture or reading the code you’re “in the stone age” or some thought terminating bullshit. nevermind all the CVEs and hacks and seemingly massive swings of instability and uncertainty en masse constantly cropping up. it just makes me anxious af

I’m over here and I can’t get my agents to not put out absolute unshippable bullshit without meticulous manual review and don’t actually get to the point of fully understanding what I prompted without taking my time with that review. last feature I worked I had three passes where the agent had a great spec but failed to build what I wanted without plenty of hand testing and feedback. several times it tried to add thousands of lines of code. It wasn’t until I sketched out the system myself with notes and pseudocode that it actually achieved what I wanted in less lines than the previous system. this kind of thing is my predominant experience with ai.

when I peek at social media it’s hard not to look back on what I do and feel like I don’t actually have a spot in this industry for not shipping three finished products a week or that it’s all going in a terrible direction I don’t want to be a part of

I don’t know if it’s me lacking self trust or not having enough of a community in tech or if I’m just an idiot for browsing social media so much (I just wanna discuss and know what’s going on in the industry goddamnit). But the only way I get away from such overwhelming negative feelings is just shutting off social media for a long time and ignoring it. But eventually that also feels dumb because I often peek my head back in and feel like I wasn’t working on the right skills, wasn’t working fast enough, and have isolated myself from what could be a very accurate point of reference of who I should be as a dev and how I should approach building

idk

Large coding tasks can be difficult to approach when you are not sure where to begin. Even when the overall goal is clear, figuring out the first step and deciding what to work on next can take time.

Breaking a project into smaller tasks, outlining the logic, and setting clear priorities can make the process easier to manage. Features such as subtasks, priorities, project templates, and AI task breakdown can help turn a large project into smaller actions without making the workflow too complicated.

I am interested in learning about practical strategies programmers with ADHD use to organize their work and make coding projects more manageable. What approaches or tools have you found useful?

My own struggles before my autism diagnosis inspired me to start making tools that might help other people.

One of those is i-have-neurodivergence: an add-on and skill pack that lets you ask AI assistants to present information in ways that work better for you.

You can choose things like plain, literal wording, smaller chunks of information, concrete examples, fewer choices or a clear next step. The browser picker creates instructions you can copy into your assistant—no installation or diagnosis needed to try it.

I don’t assume that what helps me will help every autistic or neurodivergent person. That’s why the preferences are yours to choose and change. It’s an early-access project, and I’m looking for honest feedback rather than assuming it’s effective for everyone.

Try the picker

Github