Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense.
I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's engrams?
They've corrupted their data set by padding it with generated slop, in the misguided belief that you need 10PB of data to train a brain. Every training round they load more AI slop into it, further amplifying the slop language.
It's fascinating, Sonnet 4 is still available via API and it's so much less moronic than the current model. All of the em-dashes and nonsense are a result of the repeated rounds of reinforcement learning using slop data.
I used it for a few months, and can say that no skill is up to the task of keeping Claudeuage in check. You'll get a lot more mileage out of an "output style" with the same instructions, because output styles regularly remind Claude how to speak.
Even output styles are not always up to the task (Claudeuage slips through), and they're mutually exclusive, so you can only have one active at a time.
The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on the list view." I mean, thanks, Claude, but I don't care what the code doesn't do. Don't tend to see this with other LLMs.
I almost want to try adding a rule "Never use the words 'not' or 'instead'."
Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR.
But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else.
It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.
My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition...
You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important.
In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.
That wouldn't bother me if it would just make bullet lists, which I think I'll start asking for. "Summarize", "synopsis", "brief", "concise" these rarely help I feel because its summarizing noise as well.
Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single response, but I suppose that could work it'll just take longer for everything (and Claude models are quite slow).
I don't think we can skill our way out of this one.
Claude Code has output styles; one of the predefined styles is Concise [1].
Concise: Claude leads with the result, skips preamble and narration, and
keeps responses short by default, while doing the engineering work as
thoroughly as in the Default style. When you ask for an explanation or
more detail, Claude answers in full. Claude always keeps the complete
content of error reports, security warnings, and confirmations for
destructive actions. Requires Claude Code v2.1.237 or later.
Output styles are just more context (like CLAUDE.md) with a tiny bit more weight. They very much don't force Claude to speak succinctly, no matter what you put in them.
I have such hook, and it works well. It increases time, but it’s negligible if agent works for 10+ mins before the final output. The hook is only on stop event, so agent is not interrupted during the session. I didn’t have luck in putting it to skill / md files, as agent just ignores it after a couple of iterations. The solution is not perfect, sometimes it compresses too much, and I have to reread both versions, but at least I don’t have to read load bearing stuff anymore
GLM (both mainline and flash varieties), being trained to speak a very similar Claudeish, is also atrocious about this. My AGENTS.md demands all prose be in STE100, which is trying to solve a similar problem as the skill linked in OP. Getting GLM to STFU by AGENTS instruction is nigh impossible. I use a plugin for OMP/Pi to periodically inject system prompt reminders of output style, and it still largely ignores the request, dumping novels of jargon-dense prose every turn.
DeepSeek v4 Flash isn’t much better (unsurprising- it’s an extremely stubborn model).
Weirdly, GPT Luna excels at following this type of instruction from AGENTS.md, and never forgetting it, even 400k+ tokens into the context window.
This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter"
I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named github repo because the LLM text watermarking needed to swap out a token for an alternative "just as correct" token that matches the statistical pattern.
What bothers me is the last few lines where it notes something "important" that you NEED to pay attention to. Just to find out that it is something you already mentioned somewhere in the conversation or that is not related to the current work.
I often use Google Deep Research when I want it to actually go out and find an answer for me, but the prompt must have a high school essay requirement in there. Nothing I can do prevents it from giving me a page of background that tries to make the question sound important and interesting, even when it isn't.
I usually follow up with an "I'm not reading all that" and make it summarize.
Or worse, buries an important detail somewhere in the text. Tangentially, over the weekend I had claude ask me if I wanted to continue with UIM-001. I couldn't find UIM-001 in any document it referenced creating or any text it had previously generated. Claude seems to be the worst about all of this stuff.
Also, somehow over the weekend it responded with these sections all clearly laid out - What landed, Decisions I made and recorded, Two findings, and What you need to do. Not sure why it can't do that all the time.
A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models
B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output
We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.
I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.
Is there a reason this needs 8.7k lines across 59 files (according to scc)? The prompt itself seems to be in skills/i-have-adhd/SKILL.md, which is 140 lines long at just over 1.6% of the repository.
I found 2 things helping a lot:
1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure.
2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.
Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.
Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.
Anyways the most layman way I’ve seen it explained is this: skills help save token usage for the right context. Not every request needs all instructions all the time - running tests is different than reviewing a PR, so why should the context window have instructions for both on every request?
So now you split instructions into “skill” files, which are basically opinionated markdown files. And you invoke those with something like /grill-me in the prompt depending on what you’re doing.
There are some steps to have the agent automatically know what to invoke for you but in my experience this automation is hit or miss.
It is also challenging to keep track of a growing library of skills and keeping those up to date.
So YMMV regarding skills. I typically keep things in a single markdown file even if the context window gets a bit bloated.
You can /i-have-adhd when you get a wall of text and are exasperated. You don't always want the responses that it generates when you /i-have-adhd, and things in AGENTS.md tend to lose weight as context grows.
I like the problem this is trying to solve. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether this kind of a preference should be a skill at all.
Stuff like put the answer first, don't bury the useful bit etc feel like user level preferences that should survive across tasks. Agents.md is repo context, skills are useful when a particular task needs extra instructions but this is neither really.
Right now we seem to be stuffing all 3 kinds of things into context hoping model pays attention to it where needed as session grows.
Also +1 on not making this purely about shorter output
Every chat bot has this problem. If you don't tell it to respond tersely and without conversation, it will waste a billion tokens giving you a 5 paragraph manifesto of rambling and useless redundant information.
One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.
the AGENTS.md says that file is specifically for agents working ON i-have-adhd.
When you install the skill, only the contents of the skills/ is copied over...
ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.
As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).
I fully agree with you, and I think this trend of glorifying disabilities is cringe - ADHD, autism, etc. are life-altering medical conditions and not desirable.
However, I don't think this specific project is intending to glorify ADHD or help people claim they have it - it's just piggybacking on the idea that telling current-gen LLM models that you have ADHD (allegedly) produces better results for everyone.
It's a gift until it's a curse, and ADHD crashout/burnout is an absolute monster to overcome when it arrives.
And for any person who's tasked with any sort of responsibility, it WILL arrive at some point. It's not a question of if, only a question of how well you can prepare for its arrival.
At its core it has striking similarities with a freeze response, which is overcome by increasing heart rate (e.g. stimulants, exercise, temperature shock). Big overlap with CPTSD symptoms as well.
i have it too and it sucks, I have to take medicine every day for it. Why would an attention deficit and hyperactivity be a gift? Maybe you're talking about something else.
It turns out that most of the things that ADHD people use as coping strategies just to be functional, are actually things that most (non-ADHD) people can use to be more effective and productive in their lives and work.
So, no, not everyone can or should be diagnosed as ADHD. But the tools are (mostly) universally applicable. I don't see the downside in popularizing those. (Since you posted a top-level comment instead of a reply to someone claiming to have ADHD, I have to assume that's your complaint, at any rate.)
I mean... like most spectrum disorders, most people experience and can relate to at least some of the core symptoms, even if they don't express the full spectrum or severity.
So when someone says they feel like they have ADHD, they are probably not inaccurate.
When you have it, ADHD is such a dominant factor in the way your life is organized and experienced, its not surprising that it can become a core part of your identity.
I do think it's easy for those with it to over romanticize what it's like to not have it. The lack of ADHD isn't a magic bullet for success and good life outcomes.
Like so many of life's real or perceived barriers, when one gets removed, you'll often find there is another one with a different shape just behind.
The challenge, for anyone, is pressing forward anyways.
How can someone say they have a disease or affliction while not understanding what exactly that affliction is as opposed to what they think it is/have been informed by media/society/non-professionals?
I think this is a good point. My only push back would be that when people say they have ADHD, in my experience, they're speaking about inattention (and yes, it's one of the big factors).
And while I don't love that aspect in me and often eat cold toast as result, I find that to be the least of what I struggle with (hitting every wall while walking from point A to B or constantly counting / tapping on my fingers or pulling the skin off my fingers or the anxiety or the hyper focus (love it too!) to where I lose hours upon hours...).
All this to say, I'm never offended when people use it but typically it's rooted in a narrow understanding of something that's used as a pejorative. I think there's research that by age 12 kids with ADHD have heard 20,000 more negative or corrective comments than there peers.
I mean, I can read quite a bit but if my agent / harness is producing monographs the fix has nothing to do with my ADHD. So to me, this repo seems lame.
Same. It started on Tumblr around 15 years ago when people were "self-diagnosing" themselves then it spiraled out of control. It really bothers me because I see a lot of of obviously-not-neurodivergent folks try to use it as an excuse (I am diagnosed formally + can easily detect if someone is just spouting nonsense about it)
Still a great skill, but at this point, I just write "I have adhd, can you explain that again" or "I have adhd". Works great for compressing it ELI5, but less dumb
Another favorite of fine is asking it read something then to tell me any "questions, comments concerns" it has. Great for getting the jist of articles fast.
I asked my agent if I should install this because I already have a bunch of instructions that are similar.
For example, if it's going to give me an answer that's longer than three paragraphs, I tell it to give me a TLDR at the end. This is what it gave me for this.
"TL;DR: Skip the install. You already built a better version for your world. If numbered steps and "where are we?" restatements still feel missing, cherry-pick those into one short rule instead of adding another full skill on top."
I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.
Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense.
I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's engrams?
You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here.
That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.
They've corrupted their data set by padding it with generated slop, in the misguided belief that you need 10PB of data to train a brain. Every training round they load more AI slop into it, further amplifying the slop language.
It's fascinating, Sonnet 4 is still available via API and it's so much less moronic than the current model. All of the em-dashes and nonsense are a result of the repeated rounds of reinforcement learning using slop data.
I used it for a few months, and can say that no skill is up to the task of keeping Claudeuage in check. You'll get a lot more mileage out of an "output style" with the same instructions, because output styles regularly remind Claude how to speak.
Even output styles are not always up to the task (Claudeuage slips through), and they're mutually exclusive, so you can only have one active at a time.
The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on the list view." I mean, thanks, Claude, but I don't care what the code doesn't do. Don't tend to see this with other LLMs.
I almost want to try adding a rule "Never use the words 'not' or 'instead'."
I've found it does this in two situations:
Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR.
But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else.
It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.
My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition...
You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important.
In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.
That wouldn't bother me if it would just make bullet lists, which I think I'll start asking for. "Summarize", "synopsis", "brief", "concise" these rarely help I feel because its summarizing noise as well.
Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single response, but I suppose that could work it'll just take longer for everything (and Claude models are quite slow).
I don't think we can skill our way out of this one.
Claude Code has output styles; one of the predefined styles is Concise [1].
[1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-stylesOutput styles are just more context (like CLAUDE.md) with a tiny bit more weight. They very much don't force Claude to speak succinctly, no matter what you put in them.
I have such hook, and it works well. It increases time, but it’s negligible if agent works for 10+ mins before the final output. The hook is only on stop event, so agent is not interrupted during the session. I didn’t have luck in putting it to skill / md files, as agent just ignores it after a couple of iterations. The solution is not perfect, sometimes it compresses too much, and I have to reread both versions, but at least I don’t have to read load bearing stuff anymore
GLM (both mainline and flash varieties), being trained to speak a very similar Claudeish, is also atrocious about this. My AGENTS.md demands all prose be in STE100, which is trying to solve a similar problem as the skill linked in OP. Getting GLM to STFU by AGENTS instruction is nigh impossible. I use a plugin for OMP/Pi to periodically inject system prompt reminders of output style, and it still largely ignores the request, dumping novels of jargon-dense prose every turn.
DeepSeek v4 Flash isn’t much better (unsurprising- it’s an extremely stubborn model).
Weirdly, GPT Luna excels at following this type of instruction from AGENTS.md, and never forgetting it, even 400k+ tokens into the context window.
yup.
GPT Luna tends to keep things objective. Muse Spark 1.3 is also one of the better models in this aspect, for me.
> Install
> Copy/paste into your CLI prompt:
> Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd, refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions.
This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter"
I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named github repo because the LLM text watermarking needed to swap out a token for an alternative "just as correct" token that matches the statistical pattern.
Am I being paranoid?
Always good to be paranoid.
Even MCPs are not safe. For example Notion injected ads [1] to its official MCP connector to advertise products mid-task.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_o...
No I also think it’s insane how normalised this has become
> A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer
This is just an annoying thing for anyone. It gives a 10 page dissertation that sums up to, "it's good, nothing to worry about".
What bothers me is the last few lines where it notes something "important" that you NEED to pay attention to. Just to find out that it is something you already mentioned somewhere in the conversation or that is not related to the current work.
I often use Google Deep Research when I want it to actually go out and find an answer for me, but the prompt must have a high school essay requirement in there. Nothing I can do prevents it from giving me a page of background that tries to make the question sound important and interesting, even when it isn't.
I usually follow up with an "I'm not reading all that" and make it summarize.
Or worse, buries an important detail somewhere in the text. Tangentially, over the weekend I had claude ask me if I wanted to continue with UIM-001. I couldn't find UIM-001 in any document it referenced creating or any text it had previously generated. Claude seems to be the worst about all of this stuff.
Also, somehow over the weekend it responded with these sections all clearly laid out - What landed, Decisions I made and recorded, Two findings, and What you need to do. Not sure why it can't do that all the time.
Until either of these cases happen:
A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models
B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output
We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.
I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.
Is there a reason this needs 8.7k lines across 59 files (according to scc)? The prompt itself seems to be in skills/i-have-adhd/SKILL.md, which is 140 lines long at just over 1.6% of the repository.
Appears to be the evals. Those are part of the process for developing the skill text, not something that is distributed with the skill.
I found 2 things helping a lot: 1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure. 2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.
Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.
Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.
Personally I ask it to explain it simply like it’s talking to an executive reading it on their phone while on another meeting.
Can someone explain why this is a agent skill and not just agent config (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md)?
Skills are kind of a new thing starting around January 2026, but the spec was established about 12 months ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871173
Anyways the most layman way I’ve seen it explained is this: skills help save token usage for the right context. Not every request needs all instructions all the time - running tests is different than reviewing a PR, so why should the context window have instructions for both on every request?
So now you split instructions into “skill” files, which are basically opinionated markdown files. And you invoke those with something like /grill-me in the prompt depending on what you’re doing.
There are some steps to have the agent automatically know what to invoke for you but in my experience this automation is hit or miss.
It is also challenging to keep track of a growing library of skills and keeping those up to date.
So YMMV regarding skills. I typically keep things in a single markdown file even if the context window gets a bit bloated.
You can /i-have-adhd when you get a wall of text and are exasperated. You don't always want the responses that it generates when you /i-have-adhd, and things in AGENTS.md tend to lose weight as context grows.
It's a fashion choice.
It lets the author pretend to be doing software engineering, like running tests and deploying versions.
You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".
I like the problem this is trying to solve. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether this kind of a preference should be a skill at all.
Stuff like put the answer first, don't bury the useful bit etc feel like user level preferences that should survive across tasks. Agents.md is repo context, skills are useful when a particular task needs extra instructions but this is neither really.
Right now we seem to be stuffing all 3 kinds of things into context hoping model pays attention to it where needed as session grows. Also +1 on not making this purely about shorter output
Simply adding "Keep answers short, I have ADHD" should work same as this skill.
Does it? I've tried so many versions of this in custom instructions.
I look forward to the superpowered upgrade of this I-am-a-gnat-on-crack
Every chat bot has this problem. If you don't tell it to respond tersely and without conversation, it will waste a billion tokens giving you a 5 paragraph manifesto of rambling and useless redundant information.
"Software Engineering" in 2026.
"AGI is here"
love when they put stuff in like this...
One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.
the AGENTS.md says that file is specifically for agents working ON i-have-adhd. When you install the skill, only the contents of the skills/ is copied over...
Does this not work? "Output styles" https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
Yes, a custom output style would be a more idiomatic (and likely more effective) way to implement this.
No, it does not.
ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.
I am deeply curious if there are people that would not benefit from this.
The README makes mention of The Adult ADHD Tool Kit by J. Russell Ramsay and Anthony L. Rostain which looks like a pretty good resource.
I’ve had a lot better output from my agents since I added “I probably have ADHD” in my user context
As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).
I fully agree with you, and I think this trend of glorifying disabilities is cringe - ADHD, autism, etc. are life-altering medical conditions and not desirable.
However, I don't think this specific project is intending to glorify ADHD or help people claim they have it - it's just piggybacking on the idea that telling current-gen LLM models that you have ADHD (allegedly) produces better results for everyone.
I have it and it is absolute gift that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It has taken years to figure how to harness it though.
It's a gift until it's a curse, and ADHD crashout/burnout is an absolute monster to overcome when it arrives.
And for any person who's tasked with any sort of responsibility, it WILL arrive at some point. It's not a question of if, only a question of how well you can prepare for its arrival.
At its core it has striking similarities with a freeze response, which is overcome by increasing heart rate (e.g. stimulants, exercise, temperature shock). Big overlap with CPTSD symptoms as well.
Look, I’ve got it too. I’m glad we’ve figured out how to “game” the adhd. But it’s not a gift.
i have it too and it sucks, I have to take medicine every day for it. Why would an attention deficit and hyperactivity be a gift? Maybe you're talking about something else.
Can you explain what about is it a gift? What are the benefits you get from it?
I would sum it up as an ability to think out of the box, naturally having creative solutions. Which itself is a double-edged sword...
I have found both hyperfocus and the ability to quickly "drop" (i.e. distract from) a train of thought incredibly useful.
Hyperfocus is great until it's not.
People with ADHD have "time blindness"; we don't process time the same way most people do.
We often don't realize 3 or 4 hours have passed and there were other things we needed to get done.
...you don't have it.
fighting that fight right now... was doing great until I got to a level with self directed work
I guess it's just become a term for ADHD-like or popularly believed to be ADHD behavior.
It turns out that most of the things that ADHD people use as coping strategies just to be functional, are actually things that most (non-ADHD) people can use to be more effective and productive in their lives and work.
So, no, not everyone can or should be diagnosed as ADHD. But the tools are (mostly) universally applicable. I don't see the downside in popularizing those. (Since you posted a top-level comment instead of a reply to someone claiming to have ADHD, I have to assume that's your complaint, at any rate.)
I mean... like most spectrum disorders, most people experience and can relate to at least some of the core symptoms, even if they don't express the full spectrum or severity.
So when someone says they feel like they have ADHD, they are probably not inaccurate.
No, great, I'm not offended or anything (why would I be), and I wish I could relate back, it's just a weird feeling, that's all.
No doubt.
When you have it, ADHD is such a dominant factor in the way your life is organized and experienced, its not surprising that it can become a core part of your identity.
I do think it's easy for those with it to over romanticize what it's like to not have it. The lack of ADHD isn't a magic bullet for success and good life outcomes.
Like so many of life's real or perceived barriers, when one gets removed, you'll often find there is another one with a different shape just behind.
The challenge, for anyone, is pressing forward anyways.
How can someone say they have a disease or affliction while not understanding what exactly that affliction is as opposed to what they think it is/have been informed by media/society/non-professionals?
How can anyone say anything at all...?
That generalizes all the way.
Everyone's just working off what they've experienced or what they think is true, for mental health or where to find good lunch.
There is no universal truth. Everything is moving relative to everything else. New year, new DSM.
It would be more surprising if our shared experience was more different than more the same.
I think this is a good point. My only push back would be that when people say they have ADHD, in my experience, they're speaking about inattention (and yes, it's one of the big factors).
And while I don't love that aspect in me and often eat cold toast as result, I find that to be the least of what I struggle with (hitting every wall while walking from point A to B or constantly counting / tapping on my fingers or pulling the skin off my fingers or the anxiety or the hyper focus (love it too!) to where I lose hours upon hours...).
All this to say, I'm never offended when people use it but typically it's rooted in a narrow understanding of something that's used as a pejorative. I think there's research that by age 12 kids with ADHD have heard 20,000 more negative or corrective comments than there peers.
I mean, I can read quite a bit but if my agent / harness is producing monographs the fix has nothing to do with my ADHD. So to me, this repo seems lame.
science is still early here
Same. It started on Tumblr around 15 years ago when people were "self-diagnosing" themselves then it spiraled out of control. It really bothers me because I see a lot of of obviously-not-neurodivergent folks try to use it as an excuse (I am diagnosed formally + can easily detect if someone is just spouting nonsense about it)
Ah yes the old "I have it but you don't"
Still a great skill, but at this point, I just write "I have adhd, can you explain that again" or "I have adhd". Works great for compressing it ELI5, but less dumb
I end my user CLAUDE.md files with:
"- I'm not always going to read every word, so end each summary message with a TLDR of what you found, what you recommend, and what you need from me."
It works really well.
Sol doesn't need it at all.
Another favorite of fine is asking it read something then to tell me any "questions, comments concerns" it has. Great for getting the jist of articles fast.
I asked my agent if I should install this because I already have a bunch of instructions that are similar.
For example, if it's going to give me an answer that's longer than three paragraphs, I tell it to give me a TLDR at the end. This is what it gave me for this.
"TL;DR: Skip the install. You already built a better version for your world. If numbered steps and "where are we?" restatements still feel missing, cherry-pick those into one short rule instead of adding another full skill on top."
the 'burying the answer' framing is so accurate. does the
good skill. but why should all this repo e needed for a small MD file??
If its on github, you can add it directly to your claude via the claude marketplace and manage updates within claude (or set it to auto-update)
A public repo is the easiest way to share something like this.
Nah that would be a link to a gist
I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.
This doesn't seem to be a big issue with Codex. Claude, yes - I have from time to time said "ffs one liner please".
“Be concise “
It doesn't quite work as well, or as consistently. Giving the agent some additional reason for why really does seem to help.