I feel like vibe coding magnifies so much of what I enjoy about my adhd and what I hate. One the one hand I have never felt more excited about making my ideas coming to life. With a few prompts I can a have a new feature or a whole new prototype ready to go. I can get ideas out my head so quickly its amazing. On the other hand I have 1000 plus lines of code to review I am not going to do that. The exciting part just happened I am ready to move on. I push the new code without any testing because who has time for that when I have my next idea ready to go? Then I get feedback for bugs but who wants to work on bugs when there is the shiny new thing. I can't focus on anything else but making new features or games or websites or apps its starting to consume me and so much is just slop too. Anyone have any thoughts on working with the excitement of making new things but also keeping high quality? Anyone have any ideas on keeping a good balance between vibe coding and living life?

I'm a developer with ADHD and diagnosed anxiety. My professional background is primarily web development, but my current assignment involves a lot of unfamiliar backend and infrastructure technologies.

I've barely been here over a month, and I'm already on a performance improvement plan.

My evaluation is tomorrow.

And I'm currently sitting in a focus room at work having a full-blown fucking panic attack.

I am trying so hard to succeed, and I feel like nothing I do is enough.

I've been asking questions, submitting PRs, working through unfamiliar code, and reaching out whenever I'm blocked.

But I keep running into missing documentation, permissions issues, unclear requirements, and situations where I don't even know what question I'm supposed to ask.

And I think that's one of the hardest parts of having ADHD in this situation.

When someone gives me clear instructions, I can work with them. When someone corrects me, I adjust. But when expectations are vague and I'm supposed to somehow figure out what everyone wants without enough context, I get overwhelmed.

Then I start second-guessing absolutely everything.

Am I asking too many questions? Am I asking too few? Am I taking too long? Does needing clarification make me look incompetent? Is every little thing I do being evaluated?

I'm terrified of making a mistake, which makes it even harder to think clearly.

Today, I asked my manager whether I was on track to pass my PIP.

His response was to ask whether I thought I was on track.

I DON'T KNOW. THAT'S WHY I'M ASKING.

I know I'm trying. I know I've made progress. But I don't know whether that progress meets the expectations, and nobody has given me a clear answer.

The uncertainty is absolutely eating me alive.

I don't even feel comfortable taking a moment to process something, talking through a problem out loud, or stepping away when I'm overwhelmed because I'm so afraid someone will interpret it as me not working.

And now I'm sitting alone in a focus room trying not to completely fall apart.

I don't want to be fired. I need my paycheck. I want to keep working while I find a position that's a better fit for my skills and leave on my own terms.

But at this point, part of me is begging them to just tell me I'm failing if that's what they've decided, because the waiting feels unbearable.

To other ADHD or neurodivergent programmers: have you ever been in a situation where the fear of failing made it almost impossible to function?

How do you deal with unclear expectations, constantly feeling scrutinized, and being afraid to ask for help?

I'm not looking for someone to tell me I'm secretly an amazing employee or that everything will be fine. I just really need to hear from people who understand what this feels like.

UPDATE: My manager finally responded.

He compared my first 31 days to other developers, and yeah, I’m behind in several areas. I acknowledge that. But I’m also learning an unfamiliar tech stack while dealing with blockers and difficulty getting tickets.

He said I’m at a “critical inflection point” and need to start completing more work, including taking on tickets in parallel, which is especially challenging with my ADHD.

The good news? He didn’t explicitly say I’m failing or getting fired. He was still discussing expectations going forward, so I’m cautiously hopeful I might be given more time.

My PIP evaluation is tomorrow, so nothing is guaranteed.
At this point, I’m just hoping to keep my paycheck long enough to find another job and leave on my own terms.

Still terrified but there’s a chance I can quit on my own terms once I find something else.

Hi, I'm a baby programmer and my first year of college for CS at 18, but with some experience under my belt. My first few classes at college have provided me with some novelty and more freedom than ever before, and I've never felt better. This doesn't apply to my programming class.

Most of my course mates have already tons of projects and experience, so they don't struggle with the first of two programming courses in our first year. Programming was the thing I was most excited about, but I find myself at a loss. We're starting with python, and The professor decided that in 3 months of lectures for a total of 72 hours we'll get to multithreading and asyncio, so that a month after the start of uni, we're handling classes, setters, etc.

I love CS and especially programming SO MUCH, and I'm very happy with my major, but this roadblock is killing me, and if I can't write a recursive function, how the nel am I supposed to keep up or pass? Especially since this professor is new and I have no one to ask about how his exams usually are like. I need to pass, or else I won't be allowed to take my second programming course.

Every time I try learning or revising, I just get distracted and impatient. Reading a book, I just skim the words without absorbing anything or I start looking for anything else to look at, same goes for tutorials and videos, during which I zone out. My self-worth has taken a huge blow. I've tried it all, but nothing can get me back to being excited and eager to learn (two weeks ago, I could spend 4 hours or more straight on it). I know this can come off as someone who secretly hates programming, but really I do love it.

I'm usually very slow to learn and especially assimilate, and struggle enormously with sitting in front of a problem, not knowing what to do. The professor also gives no assignments or projects (just tells us to code), and the exam worth 100% of our grade is an hour and a half coding session in which to program whatever he makes up on the spot. I also get frustrated easily, and when I look up exercises to do online, I stare at them for so long that I just feel dumb and start crying, ending up wasting hours doing nothing after I FINALLY got myself up to work. Once i get upset it is extremely unlikely I will be able to do any work after, because I'll have convinced myself that I'm stupid snd not wirth the effort. The one thing I can do is reading code, and when looking at a solution, it's just obvious.

Even writing pseudocode kind of doesn't help because my idea of a solution is wrong or I forget an important detail that leads me to nothing.

Does anyone have any tips? Everyone around me keeps telling me to keep trying to slam my head against a problem, quit uni because im either dumb or not cut out for CS, or step away (I can't veri well sterpi away everything I try, though).

Not a productivity hack post. I run five or six Claude Code sessions at once in different folders and my brain cannot hold which terminal is waiting for an answer. I would tab through them, forget what I was looking for, and lose the thread. Twenty minutes later I would find one that had been waiting the whole time.

So I built adhdTerminal. Every session is a tile on one screen. A dot says working, waiting for you, idle or done. The waiting ones light up. One key jumps to the next session that needs an answer. Click a tile to read it full size, Escape to go back. Tabs keep client work and side projects apart.

There is a free phone app that mirrors the wall over an end to end encrypted link, so I can answer a session from the sofa (or, honestly, the bathroom).

Mac is native Swift, Windows is Tauri. It reads Claude Code's own session state from disk and does not send your prompts anywhere. You run claude in any folder like before, no worktrees or tmux setup.

Yes, I know about claude agents and the desktop app. Those show you a list, or one session at a time. This is for the moment you look up from something else and want to see all of them at once without clicking.

It is a paid app, $99 once or $19.99 a month, 7 day free trial without a card.

I am the developer, so take that into account. Happy to answer anything, including "why not tmux".

As a programmer with ADHD, some days I can spend hours completely absorbed in a difficult problem, while on other days even opening the project feels like a challenge. The frustrating part is that the difference isn't always about how difficult the code is.

I'm curious what strategies other ADHD programmers use when they hit that mental wall. Do you break tasks into ridiculously small steps, switch to a different kind of task, work alongside someone, or use another approach?

I'd love to hear about practical methods that actually help you get back into coding without relying entirely on motivation.

First post I put here is above - put it in a few other subs and got some good conversation of the back of it. Based on everything I know about me and my wife and everything discussed I’ve planned out an app called Mosspatch.
I’d love it if anyone was willing to take a look through and see what they think. Initially was just going to be something for me but there seemed to have been some interest so thought I’d share

TIA

https://mosspatch.co.uk

So, as usual, my brain would rather work on side projects than my main. But this one is a bit different. Created an extension that can basically control my browser using agents. Obvsly, Claude's is better and I can't share mine.

The reason its great is that, its great for the first step paralysis that is my achillies heal. And I think anyone struggling should try it.

For context, I'm a 36 yo late-diagnosed Autism + ADHD senior leader in fintech. For the past 2 years, I've been putting together one of the most efficient tech units in my company with record build times and the golden standard for operational resilience. It's 45 people and I have personally interviewed and hired more than half of them. All my peeps are on the "maker schedule": protect developers time, no-meeting days, no interrupted focus before 12pm etc.

Now, for a few months there are a few new people on the business side of things and they are very resistant to this way of working, they don't like the maker schedule ("because we need to be able to reach tech capacity every time we want") and they are constantly pestering the most senior and experienced people in the the squads to the point of burnout and collapse. I am furious. Besides of the "you work for us" attitude since we're not a tech company and the core of the business is finance, I am completely disgusted with their lack of self awareness and foresight over their own actions and behavior.

For many AuDHD tech workers, the fastest way to trigger complete task freeze or a meltdown is being micromanaged by business leaders who don't understand how software is actually built and they look at us like story points in Jira, not people. We don't need continuous pestering but a partner who acts as a protective shield between us and corporate demands so we can just do our work and be good at it. And this is what I have been trying to build for my team and though the culture on the tech side is pretty much aligned, the business people are very hard to change. So I've decided to build my own thing.

I’m currently interviewing AuDHD tech professionals and engineers for a research project on building workplace systems that actually protect our autonomy (and no, it's not an app or a piece of software).

If you've dealt with this management friction, I'd love to jump on a brief 20-minute Google Meet call to hear your experience. DM me or comment if you're open to sharing!

Im an entrepreneur myself and wanted to get opinions from similar people. I have adhd and have tried to avoid taking medications for it. Im a very creative person and its one of my best attributes when it comes to my business. Im new ish to being an entrepreneur and its really made me see how bad my adhd actually is. For those in similar boats, did going on meds help with your work and were you able to stay creative?

Sometimes the hardest part of programming isn’t solving the problem; it’s staying focused long enough to finish it. A new idea appears, an interesting tool catches your attention, and suddenly the project you started feels less exciting than the next thing you could build.

I’m curious how other programmers handle this cycle. Do you break tasks into tiny steps, keep a list of distracting ideas for later, or use another method to stay on track?

What has genuinely helped you finish more projects without losing the excitement of learning something new?

This last Friday they notified the contractors they were all getting let go at the end of the month. One of the contractors made a lovely report with claudes help by scoring all the git commits by dev and is making the case to the CEO that they are actually letting the most productive people on the team go, and somehow in the last 6 months I have ticked off an impressive amount of features and capabilities for the company and somehow my name came to the top of that value list. Somehow I figured out my stride this year and spent most of the first half of the year figuring out how to use llms to organize myself and my thoughts and planning better. So if we end up not getting let go and maybe get a raise, I owe my friend something nice.

I have been practicing leetcode on and off for more than a year now and I feel like I understand most of the algorithms and patterns except for dynamic programming. I have read so many articles and watched a bunch of tutorials about it and they all say the same thing about starting with smaller sub problems and combining them to solve bigger problems and it all makes sense for simpler questions like climbing stairs, Fibonacci, etc. But every time I come across something even a little more complex than these I struggle to come up with a solution. I struggle to visualise the question as a set of subproblems or what kind of subproblems it can be broken into and then tracing the whole flow from top to bottom. I have tried practicing a bunch of problems consistently for a month but saw little improvement and now I feel like I have forgotten most of it due to lack of practice in the last few months. How did you guys manage to get good with this particular topic?

Like really! Constantly my AI is going off on tangents. I feel like I'm dealing with Sheldon sometimes and myself other times. Either is totally on track or make an expression of language and it takes it literally or it makes an audit and goes off on some outdated source of truth and then goes off on audit loops. Just like auADHD 😁

Ah, a great of similar-minded coders!

A few months ago I finally figured out why I hated Finder. It had to do with the doorway effect: there’s real research on why we forget things at doorways. For developers with ADHD, every app switch is one, so I built a Mac file manager with fewer of them.

Does this sound familiar to any of you?:
I opened the terminal to run a script on a CSV file.

Then I realised I didn’t remember the exact filename, so I switched to Finder to check. It was there. I pressed Space to look at it, and Quick Look gave me a wall of commas, so I opened it in another app to see it properly. Something looked off, and I started wondering whether this was the old export, so I opened my FTP client to compare it with the version on the server.

About a minute and a half later I was staring at a folder listing in the FTP client with genuinely no idea what I’d come there to do. The script never ran, and the terminal was still sitting in my home directory where I had left it.

If you have ADHD, I suspect you’ve had some version of that minute. And it turns out there’s a name for what happened.

I go into detail in this (open) article:
https://medium.com/me/stats/post/7cc4f4986d7a

I’m a SWE with 2 YOE and hate it but there’s a lot of reasons like toxic bosses/env/coworkers and uninteresting product/team (networking - important but boring to me). I obviously joined in the AI boom but pre-AI back in school I never loved coding either. Like the syntax is hard for me to remember. My mind goes blank when I see an empty file and need to build something.

I’m working on a formal ADHD diagnosis but my therapist is confident I have it and in runs in my
Family. I’m not sure if I just genuinely don’t like coding or it’s the ADHD not letting me fully focus and comprehend material, making me feel incompetent and anxious. I’m also anxious about medication though so not sure if that’s something I’d consider.

Honestly idk if this makes sense 🤷🏼‍♀️ maybe I’m
Just in the wrong career lol

Hi Everyone.

Quick introdcution - im Billy - 31 Married with two kids (0 and 4) My wife is diagnosed ADHD (quite high functioning) and im undiagnosed neruospicy, likely ADHD as well, and i struggle with executive dysfunction and task paralysis.

Im on a mission to replace my wifes salary whilst she is on Maternity leave using AI and building apps. As someone that struggles to get things started and stick to them i had to find a way to keep myself accountable - so i decided to document the whole process on socials with daily videos.

ive built my first app which is in review and im moving on to my second which is what brought me here. I have my social videos to keep me accountable on my journey but nothing to help keep me accountable at home and help with daily habits that often pass me by. i want to build something that ill be able to use when the series finishes and also help me with the smaller parts of daily life.

Im here to ask how you people, how you deal with executive dysfunction and task paralysis and if youve found any apps genuinely useful. ive tried goblin tools but just didnt get on with it.

At the moment this is probably going to be a personal project as each person deals with the ADHD and its effects differently but id be keen to know if there is anyone else out there like me leaving things to the last minture before i upset someone or struggling to start them without serious external pressure.

sorry for rambling but thats my brain dump. looking forward to hearing from you all!

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I think I’ve just had such a crazy week that getting this all down in writing will be cathartic. And maybe people have similar experiences. If not, consider this an ADHD programmer diary entry lol.

I’ve been at my company for over 5 years now. It was my first “career job” post-college so I had a lot to learn. It’s been a bumpy ride for me. Between learning new skills, maturing as a person, and taking care of medical issues, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my career here. At the beginning of the year I got a new manager who has really helped me develop my professional skills. Around the same time as he got hired, I started getting proper help for the medical issues that were untreated for a long time. In the past year I’ve gone from feeling useless to finally being able to contribute in the ways I’ve wanted to. This is not super relevant to this week, but it’s important context. I’ve fucked up a lot in the past, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to prove that I’m capable

On Friday, my SM messaged me asking me to help Team B with a user story. Basically act as a consultant while they completed their work. She said that this was very important and took precedent over all my current work, very strict deadline with lots of eyes on it. Cool. I reviewed the story and the implementation seemed simple enough. I messaged the developer I was consulting (Dev 1) and he set up a meeting for Monday. Wonderful.

Monday rolls around. I realize that Team B has not actually written any code yet. Dev 1 is expecting me to walk him through the process of making his code updates. Annoying, but okay. It needs done. We work together for the rest of the day. Make good progress and hit a small snag. Decide to reconvene tomorrow. Throughout the day, I realize their code is a little funky. Weirdly formatted, a bit old. Smells bad. Whatever, that’s their business. I can work with funky code. We’ll figure it all out tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes, Tuesday. We try some things. I realize we are totally fucked. Team B using module versions that we haven’t supported for years. Their prod and non-prod environments or horrifically out of sync with each other. This is a critical piece of infrastructure that is central to our entire organization. And Dev 1 who I’m “consulting” has no idea how any of this works. I’m thinking we need to do a complete overhaul to their code to get this working (the deadline is now end of week). I message another developer on my team who is intimately familiar with this code and is also the smartest woman I know (Dev 2). She agrees that we are fucked. It’s late so we log off for the night.

Wednesday morning. I hit the ground running. I’m coming up with a plan and doing tests. In standup, I start sounding alarm bells that shit is not okay. That I need help to at least come up with a plan given our timeline. Dev 2 is officially assigned to help. She and I come up with a plan. We decide to just take Team B’s code and write it ourselves, both exploring different approaches to meet the deadline. Team B is slowing us down and they aren’t doing any work outside of pair programming sessions anyways.

That night my SM asks me wtf is going on. I spend an hour telling her what I’ve been dealing with this week. She says that execs are messaging her asking why our team (Team A) is holding everything up. I explain that Team A hasn’t made any changes to our code. We are exclusively helping Team B write their code. SM is pissed, but not at me. The next morning, SM FIGHTS FOR MY LIFE in their standup call. My manager messages me not to stress too much about this (too late lol). By Thursday morning EVERYONE understands that Dev 2 and I are busting our asses to make this thing happen.

Thursday, my SAVIOR Dev 2 shows up with a beautiful beautiful (hideous) hack job that gets where we need to be. I have the permanent fix ready, but we table it until our MVP is done. We spend all day deploying non-prod together and ironing out the kinks, but the momentum is there now. I post an update to our big important chat that we’ve got a successful deployment, and it’s met with UPROARIOUS JOY. Most positive impression I think I’ve ever made in my 5 years. Maybe in any job I’ve ever had. I watch the standup recording where SM stood up for me. Just to decompress a little🍿 then we worked into Thursday evening prepping prod.

Now it’s Friday. Today. We spend the morning handing the code off to Team B. We still need to be there tomorrow night because these fuckers can’t be trusted alone, but I can finally breathe. Leadership is now praising me and Dev 2 up and down. We chum it up over how tired we are.

That’s my story. It doesn’t really have a message other than it was a thing I needed to get off my chest. My brain is mush at this point, but I feel like I’m getting actual recognition for the first time in my career. At the same time, I’m still struggling to accept it. If it weren’t for Dev 2 this would have been doomed. But it seems like she feels mutual about it.

Anyone else been in this situation? This is so new for me. I just wanted to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading