Coding with ADHD: I lose 20 minutes re-reading my own code after every break — so I built a tool that hands me the first line

firstline-dev — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:11:23 +0000

I'm a developer with ADHD. Every time I close a tab, restarting my own
code costs me twenty minutes — so I built a tool that hands me the first
line instead of a plan.

It always ends the same way.

I'm deep in a fix — middleware, a race condition, something with teeth —
and life interrupts. A meal. A call. A kid. I tell myself: five minutes.
I close the tab.

When I come back, the file looks like a stranger wrote it. I read the
function. Then the file. Then the diff. Twenty minutes gone before I
remember what I was about to type. Some days it's forty. I stopped
counting.

The reboot is the real ADHD tax

If you code with ADHD, you know this cold start. It's not a focus
problem. Focus was never the problem — restarting is. Task paralysis
doesn't announce itself; it just quietly eats the first twenty minutes
of every session.

Abbey Perini's dev.to series on coding and ADHD named what I couldn't:
the inability to start is often rooted in shame
(https://dev.to/abbeyperini/coding-and-adhd-cant-start-23l3). You've been
told your whole life that you're careless, so every cold start carries a
tax of "here we go again." Gabor Maté describes ADHD as "forgetting to
remember the future." If it's not written down, it doesn't get done. And
between you and me: nobody re-reads their own notes.

It's not just me. A 2025 ICSE study of professional developers found
programmers with ADHD are 1.8 to 4.4 times more likely to struggle with
everyday engineering challenges than their neurotypical peers. Everyday
stuff. Not hard stuff.

Why the usual cures failed me

Todo apps: red badges, broken streaks, guilt. None of it wrote a single line of code.
Notes: see above. If it's not where the code is, it doesn't exist.
AI chat: it helps, but pasting my context into a chat window every time became its own context switch — and context switching is exactly the tax I was trying to escape.

Then I noticed what actually gets me moving again. Not a plan. Not a
checklist. One line. Someone — a colleague, a rubber duck, an old comment
— saying "just change this one line first." The first line is small
enough that shame can't argue with it.

So I built that someone

FirstLine is a free-tier, localStorage-only context-saver for developers
with ADHD: it captures your context in 15 seconds before you leave, and
hands you the first line to write when you return.

Three moves:

Save — before you leave, hit Ctrl+Shift+S. Project, what you were working on, next step, what's blocking you. Fifteen seconds.
Return — open it later. Your context is on one card. No plan, no guilt, no onboarding.
Start — it builds one copy-ready prompt that hands your AI the context and asks for ONLY the first line. Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor.

It's live, and free to try (3 starts, no account):
https://firstline-dev.lovable.app

Your brain doesn't need a plan. It needs a line.

Design choices for ADHD brains

No accounts, no servers. Your context never leaves the browser. Unfinished code is embarrassing; it stays on your machine.
No streaks. The footer shows "Active days" — miss a week and the number just waits. Streaks are shame with a calendar.
Free to save and view, forever. Only first-line generation is metered: 3 free starts, then $27 once.
Open code. The repo is public so you can check me instead of trusting me: https://github.com/firstline-dev/firstline

About that price: I build from a country where Stripe doesn't operate,
so payment is one-time USDT on TRON. No subscription, no data broker.
You pay once, you own it. Thirty-day refund — reply to your delivery
email, no questions. The whole story is on one page:
https://firstline-dev.github.io/firstline/

I'm anonymous, and that's not hiding — it's coherence. A privacy tool
built by someone who respects privacy.

If you've ever googled "how to resume coding after interruption adhd" at
2am, this was written for you. Roast it in the comments — the meaner the
comment, the more useful.

DEV Community: firstline-dev

Coding with ADHD: I lose 20 minutes re-reading my own code after every break — so I built a tool that hands me the first line

The reboot is the real ADHD tax

Why the usual cures failed me

So I built that someone

Design choices for ADHD brains