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I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer

This GitHub project introduces "i-have-adhd," a plugin designed to streamline coding agent outputs by eliminating conversational fluff and focusing on immediate, actionable steps. Inspired by ADHD-friendly communication principles, it enforces ten specific rules to make AI responses concise and directive, enhancing developer productivity. Its popularity on HN stems from its practical application of prompt engineering to a common pain point: AI verbosity, offering a clever solution for clearer technical guidance.

18
Score
3
Comments
#6
Highest Rank
18h
on Front Page
First Seen
Sep 8, 3:00 PM
Last Seen
Sep 9, 9:00 AM
Rank Over Time
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The Lowdown

i-have-adhd is a novel GitHub project offering a skill or plugin for AI coding assistants, aiming to significantly improve the clarity and actionability of their responses. It specifically targets the common issue of AI verbosity, providing a structured approach to generate outputs that are direct, concise, and immediately useful, drawing inspiration from principles beneficial for individuals with ADHD but applicable to anyone seeking efficiency.

  • Purpose: The skill transforms verbose AI coding agent responses into "ADHD-friendly" outputs, characterized by their directness and action-first approach.
  • Mechanism: It operates through a set of ten explicit rules designed to guide the AI's response generation.
  • Key Rules: These rules include leading with the next action, numbering multi-step tasks, suppressing tangents, restating state, providing specific time estimates, making wins visible, matter-of-fact error reporting, capping lists at five items, and eliminating preambles, recaps, and closers.
  • Impact: The "before" and "after" examples clearly demonstrate how the plugin converts a conversational, suggestive AI response into a numbered, executable set of instructions.
  • Installation & Customization: Users can install the skill by copying a CLI command or following detailed instructions, and it can be tuned by forking the repository and editing the SKILL.md file.
  • Inspiration: The project is loosely based on "The Adult ADHD Tool Kit," adapted to dictate how an LLM should respond rather than how a human organizes their day.

By codifying a set of prompt engineering best practices into a shareable skill, i-have-adhd offers a compelling solution for developers frustrated by overly verbose or unhelpfully conversational AI outputs, promising to deliver clarity and efficiency where it's most needed.