r/ADHD_Programmers

I am learning python and I am bad at it.

I fit into the AuDHD type (autism and adhd combine, got a late diagnosis). I wanted to know is there a reason why my brain is so demotivated whenever I try to learn something like programming for example but when it comes to other things, like video games, I am all into it?

Or is this either I am lazy or too slow. I can’t seem to focus and after 1 leetcode problem, I am done for the day, which takes forever for me to figure out and then enter burnout mode and get frustrated. I just can’t hack myself and feel demotivated. Sometimes when I am practicing problems, my brain goes all over the place. I mean, simple things take forever to figure out.

I am 35 if this matters. I don’t know if this is the right sub, but appreciate the help. If not, let me know and I will delete.

I just don’t understand why my brain so lazy and demotivated when it comes to learning but super interested when it comes to other things?

How did you succeed in becoming a better programmer?

I hate my brain with how distractable it is. first question. how do you guys cope with those thoughts, because from my point of view, reddit is big giant pile of distraction. new topic, go deep down on rabbit hole, interact with community (more like, passively reading what people are saying), and then move to the next shiny thing. I used cold turkey on windows 11. but currently my main machine is linux. I want to self block, but it is hard because I can undo it myself.

next question, with how the computer works, it is possible to gather data on ourselves. I use something like activitywatch to make log of my activity. the problem is what's next. Is there something like a launcher replacement, that generate set of application I can access on the fly, suitable based on my intent? If I need to work on my paper, I don't need sudo access to debug my apps. If I browse reddit as part of task, do text classification task if the content of the reddit is actually relevant to my current task. determine if I need browser or not, edit and block host file or switch dns on the fly based on the task profile. ideally, the first thing I am doing as I boot is looking at my current todo and look which one to do for this session.

Now you can’t even write AI, it litterally prevents you from posting assuming you are promoting it. Imagine the stupidity.

Create a free MCP server for your website or organization. It allows direct integration with any other LLM or agent.

https://robauto.ai/create-mcp

Let me know if this sounds familiar: You get a brilliant idea, grind your way to 70% completion, and then... bam. A wild new idea appears. You abandon the first project, chase the new one, and the cycle inevitably repeats.

I recently looked back at my own progress and had a harsh reality check. Because of this relentless Shiny Object Syndrome, I have exactly ZERO fully completed projects. Just a digital graveyard of 70%-done repositories.

So, I’m putting my foot down and starting over from the very first idea I ever had.

🕵️‍♂️ The Original Project: Terminal Alibi

The concept sparked after I participated in a prompt injection competition. I wanted to build an interactive mystery game where the player acts as a detective, and the AI plays a criminal suspect. The core gameplay loop? Breaking the suspect's alibi using nothing but your words.

🧱 The Bottleneck (Why I dropped it)

Making an AI roleplay as a suspect in a crime immediately triggered standard safety guardrails. I kept hitting the dreaded predefined wall: "I cannot fulfill this request."

My options at the time weren't great:

Common APIs: Too heavily censored for compelling crime roleplay.

Uncensored Local Models: Too hardware-demanding. A standard laptop simply couldn't handle the power requirements natively.

Right as I hit this roadblock, another shiny new idea caught my eye, and the detective game was shelved.

🚀 The Revival & The Tech Pivot

I’m back at it, but with a massive shift in how the game runs. Instead of forcing heavy, unconstrained roleplay from an API, I'm focusing purely on gamified prompt injection. More importantly, I'm powering it using the small, highly capable models baked directly into your browser.

If you use a Chromium-based browser, you likely already have these models sitting on your machine knowingly or unknowingly (you can enable them via chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano).

My goal is to utilize this zero-install, local AI resource that almost everyone already has without even realizing it.

I’m currently wrestling with a new technical hurdle on this build, but I refuse to let Shiny Object Syndrome win this time. I guess you all will get to see the finished, playable version of this soon enough! 😅

Has anyone else here successfully broken out of the 70%-completion loop? How did you finally force yourself to finish that first project?

hello

Ive been a developer for 2 years interning, 3 years full time, and recently have become a tech lead. it was a very fast & unexpected but I was excited because I love(d) my job!!

now we are being forced to use AI for everything. i mean everything. agentic teams are a requirement by end of year. im extremely frustrated and my entire team is burnt out. I try to bring up many reasons not to be so heavily reliant on AI to higher ups, but it just is brushed to the side. Now they are also tracking our AI usage and we can see how much money our ai usage costs, and we are supposed to be working on not only adopting it, but trying to use as little credits as possible with our workflows.

i really enjoy programming! even as a tech lead with more interaction vs actual code writing, ive always enjoyed researching and solving complex problems. I am good at it when given the time to do research and thinking, im kinda good at talking to people, in my own way (that doesnt always jive with the corporate world). since becoming a tech lead ive been working on my intense audhd masking and trying to find the balance.

what im NOT good at is people forcing me to work a certain way in my own time, and just continue to give me anecdotes of how much better it is with nothing to back it up. even the thought of it makes me want to throw up. ive been working my hardest to find ways that work for ME as to not suffer from burnout, now this?? also, no guidelines or standards. just "do it" and "do it right". the amount of money spent on something we can't really seem to show how its helping makes me so mad !! totally ignoring the environment consequences, which im supposed to just set to the side at work. i cant !!

this is maybe more of a rant coming out a meltdown of frustration with what feels like the inability for anyone to understand me, but im also curious if anyone else feels the same way or is in a similar situation and has any words of wisdom. I feel like ive been scouring but havent seen a ton of people who are in a company that is totally "you must use ai for everything" -- ive been thinking about how ive literally been in love with programming my entire life but if you told me this was the future of it i wouldve taken a different career path in an instant. Maybe need some more senior devs to tell me this is all gonna blow over lol. or maybe just commiserate. ugh!

1. I pretend like I've lost control over my body, reduces mental chatter and negotiating myself out of a task (idea courtesy of pornhub)
2. I set alarms for EVERYTHING, I have about 40 alarms a day. I pair my mental needs with habits I already have. Like, if I drink a glass of water in the morning, that automatically means I do a 10 minute morning walk. I don't negotiate with myself about whether I'm "in the mood". One habit triggers the other. I also use Soothfy because it really helps me figure out what my brain needs and turn that into something practical I can actually do. That's how I make habits work with my ADHD brain.
3. I change into my gym outfit before leaving the office so I can get home, dump my bag, grab my shoes and go, not fall victim to the sit pit
4. I tell people I'm doing something and that they should ask me in 2 days to see how it's going, public accountability
5. Same thing as the last one, I post pictures of everything I'm doing on social media
6. None of my meals take longer than 5 mins to put together, and minimal dirty dishes
7. I have 5 pants, 5 shirts, I wear them in rotation, over and over again for 2 years and them replace them w the exact same
8. I have one pair of shoes for non gym stuff, one for gym stuff, one for running, one pair of dressy heels, all in black because they go w everything
9. I only have 7 pairs of socks and would never rewear so forced to do laundry once a week
10. I have a designated spot for every thing in my room and house
11. I went and got a full time job even though I have a startup because a wholly unstructured day where I'm not accountable to anyone was a recipe for disaster, I was working till 3 am, doomscrolling then some, and waking up at 2 pm, it was fucking absurd, being forced to sit at a desk mentally sharp early in the morning made me pull it together, I don't plan on quitting until I have a few employees, at this stage I'm still a solopreneur
12. I listen to a 10 hour loop of David Goggins on Spotify to shame myself out of inaction
13. I don't fold laundry, everything (including t shirts) just goes on hangers, socks and underwear stuffed in a basket, pair of socks stuffed into each other

What are your hacks?

Reaching a two year unemployment anniversary as of September, was laid off from last job. 45 years old, 25 YOE, hundreds of applications and facing loosing everything I’ve worked for.

I need a cathartic release, I’m done:

- with applying for jobs and being ghosted
- being tasked with a take-home assignment with unrealistic time expectations
- having a prerequisite to taking to a human blocked by a screening interview with an AI or recording of a video
- seeing the same job I applied for get re-posted every couple of weeks
- attempting to multitask a live coding exercise, whilst concurrently answering quick fire questions from a panel
- having to sit through numerous rounds of interviews, whilst the employer attempts to work out exactly what it is they want
- face rejection because I failed to say the exact phrase the employer wanted to hear
- being forced to accommodate a 4 day in-office policy, because it’s “good for social interaction”
- face scrutiny over my period of unemployment form a hiring manager that is completely unaware of how f***ed the job market is

Finally, I’m done with AI!

your turn…

1. When you try to focus on programming, what do you currently use to stay on track
2. If you use a timer/pomodoro, what do you use it on(Phone, computer, physical timer)
3. What is the biggest problem you have had with whatever you're using currently
4. What do you like/dislike about physical timers/digital timers
5. What have you tried that you eventually stopped using, and why?

It probably didn't help that for the first six of those hours, I was pissing about waiting around for medication to kick in and wondering why I couldn't seem to settle to any task, before then realising I'd actually forgotten to take the bloody stuff today. After hitting the 8 hour mark and achieving nothing, I was well on my way to an anxiety attack over wasting so much time.

But the bug is fixed, so I am choosing to consider today a fucking success, god damn it!!

I've been learning how to program for the past 1.5-ish years.

I've learned the basics of HTML, CSS, JS and React for frontend and Node.js, Express, Cookies, Sessions, JWT, Authentication, Databases, ORMs, etc for the backend.

I'm able to make relatively simple projects or AT MOST projects with medium-ish complexity.

However, I have a poor working memory capacity, that has always been the case.

The way it expresses itself is in two major ways:

1.Whenever I have to make a feature that requires holding several things at once in my mind or thinking more than two steps ahead, my mind just gets overwhelmed. That is the case especially if the feature/task I have to complete is new/unknown/I haven't encountered it before.

2. Whenever I try to work on a project that is more complex, my mind can't keep track of all the names, functions, filenames, directories, where what is located, etc. I constantly have to go back, re-check what a given function does, what a given Component contains, etc

I've tried breaking problems into smaller ones, externalizing as much as possible and other 'tricks', but none of them really worked.

So I'm curious, is programming even feasible for someone with low working memory capacity as myself? Is there something I can do to improve it or atleast make it so it doesn't negatively impact my programming skills?

Are there any YouTubers that really clicked with you?

When my body is tired and in pain there is no way I can concentrate on the correct form. Each time I have been able to make progress in my workout sessions it always ends up leading to one injury to another, (shoulders and wrists usually) then I have to stop working out for months/years. How does one get around this. Are there ADHD friendly workouts?

Can anyone suggest a good course and/or learning platform for algorithms for absolute dumdums? I tried MIT lectures, I tried various courses but the information just didn't stay in my head, I don't have a good base as I'm a self taught programmer.