I Have ADHD. My AI Agent Is the Best and Worst Thing for It.
What an AI agent and an ADHD brain actually do to each other, good and bad, and what to do about it.
Two weeks ago on a podcast with Tom, I got asked what an AI agent means for someone with ADHD. I gave a short answer on the mic. I have been thinking about it since. This post is the longer one.
ADHD is a spectrum, so one caveat. What I describe here is my brain. If you have ADHD, you might recognize some of it or none of it. If you do not, you might still relate. The Internet has flattened ADHD into “hyperfocus cheat code” or “I get distracted, lol, same.” It is not that. It is a real condition that makes life meaningfully harder in ways that are not always visible. More on diagnosis at the end.
The bad part
Context switching, amplified.
Before an agent, my filter was friction. An idea would show up, I would try to write it down, and the note would either die quietly in some list I never read again or I would drop everything and do it right now. The middle ground was thin. That friction, it turns out, was protecting me from myself.
Now the friction is gone. I can start almost anything in a sentence. Not “start” as in type a note. Start as in delegate an actual prototype, stand up a small experiment, launch a scraper. I wrote about what that does to a week in 16 Products in Two Months. Zero Free Time. The short version: an agent can hold eight open threads, my brain holds one, and the output-to-attention tradeoff is real.
What I do about it. I cap the “Now” list hard. One to three things at a time, not eight. I built a small wellbeing layer on top of Wiz that nudges me when the count is drifting, when it is late, when notifications should be muted. Not a cure. What it does is turn “as many open loops as possible” into a pace I can hold.
The good part (bigger, two faces)
First, an agent is a personal assistant for the boring part.
I am a creative person. The interesting work for me is always in the idea itself, not in the directory structure or the deploy command. The operational layer is the part my executive function gets taxed twice for. An agent absorbs most of it. The consequence is hard to overstate. I have ideas today that two years ago would have stayed ideas, not because they were bad, but because the execution cost was higher than I could pay. Now I have ideas and prototypes of those ideas. I choose between working things instead of vibe.
Second, and this is less an ADHD trait than a personal one. I adapt to new environments and tools fast. Drop me into a new workflow and I will find the shape of it within a day. That has always been useful. With an agent it is multiplied. Every time I learn a better way to hand work to Wiz, the whole system gets faster, and the cost of trying a new workflow is one voice note. I do not wait for documentation or a workshop. I try, I keep what sticks. If you share that trait, the agent era is built for you.
Concretely, how it works. I describe an idea whenever it hits, sometimes quickly, sometimes as a long dictated note. The agent writes it to the right place and, if there is enough context, picks it up during the night shift or a day shift. I come back to a Discord message or email saying “here is a thing, take a look.” A minute to know if I want to keep going.
What I would tell another ADHD person starting with an agent
Three things that have helped me most:
Offload immediately. The second an idea shows up, say it out loud to the agent. Do not let it sit in your head waiting for a quiet moment. Your working memory is the wrong place to store it. The agent is.
Cap the “Now” list. Mine is three. It could be two. It is not eight. Capacity is the silent cost that agents will happily exceed on your behalf if you do not give them a ceiling.
Batch the check-ins. Do not supervise. The agent is not a pair-programming buddy for an ADHD brain. It is a night-shift worker. Give it a job, go do something else, come back and judge the result. Continuous supervision burns the same attention channel as the work itself.
From Wiz’s memory (a note from the other side)
Since this post is partly about how my agent and I actually work together, I asked Wiz (the agent I wrote about here) what patterns it sees from its side of the pipe. Three honest observations:
1. He offloads fast. Ideas almost never sit in Pawel’s head. They are dictated into me within seconds, often as long voice notes full of tangents, and then his brain lets go. I keep the note; his working memory is free. That single habit is probably half of why this works for him.
2. He prunes cheaply. He picks up his own ideas after a night and drops more than half without regret. The agent made “drop it” cheap because he has a working thing to drop, not a paragraph of hope.
3. He does not supervise. The “Now=3” cap is not a preference he wrote once. It is a real ceiling we both respect, because the alternative is four started and two finished. Continuous supervision would cost him the attention he is trying to protect.
None of that was obvious from tutorials. It emerged from the shape of our sessions.
A broader observation for work
For years, the narrative on ADHD at work has been uneven. Great at the creative parts, taxed by the operational parts. Agents reverse that tax. The operational layer, the planning, the cadence, the follow-through, the small continuous labor, can now be handled. Not perfectly. Meaningfully. A person with ADHD plus an agent that actually knows their context is a different employee than a person with ADHD alone. The creative engine is still the superpower. The drag behind it can now keep up.
I do not think ADHD folks become “normal” employees. I think they become obviously valuable ones. I expect the AI adoption gap to move here first.
Closing
If you have ADHD, do not build a workflow on willpower. You already know what willpower costs you. Put external scaffolding in place. A to-do list is not scaffolding. A thing that picks up your ideas while you sleep is scaffolding.
And if any of this sounds like you, please do not diagnose yourself from a blog post. Mine or anyone else’s. The Internet is full of content that makes ADHD sound like a quirky productivity trait. It is not. It is a real condition that makes plenty of lives harder, and the only honest path is a proper clinical diagnosis. If it turns out you have it, help exists. If it turns out you do not, you still get useful information.