I have ADHD. I run an AI agent. Those two facts interact, and the interaction is not a clean win. It is a trade.
I wrote the long version on my blog this week. Here is the compressed view for fellow builders.
The bad part. An agent lets you start almost anything in a sentence. The natural friction that used to protect me from myself (ideas either died quietly or I dropped everything) is gone. An agent can hold eight open threads. My brain holds one. Output goes up, attention per thing goes down. A productivity paradox I walked straight into.
The good part, which is bigger. An agent absorbs the operational layer of work. The planning, the boilerplate, the follow-through, the small continuous labor that used to tax me twice. I have ideas today that two years ago would have stayed ideas, not because they were bad but because the execution cost was more than my brain could pay. Now I have ideas and prototypes of those ideas. I choose between working things.
The personal-trait angle. I adapt to new environments and tools fast. With an agent, that trait is multiplied. Every time I find a better way to hand work over, the whole system gets faster, and the cost of trying a new workflow is one voice note. If you share that trait, the agent era is built for you.
How it works concretely. 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.
Three things that have helped me most:
- Offload immediately. Your working memory is the wrong place to store an idea. The agent is.
- Cap the "Now" list. Mine is three. It is not eight. Capacity is the silent cost that agents will happily exceed on your behalf.
- Batch the check-ins. Do not supervise. The agent is a night-shift worker, not a pair-programming buddy.
A quiet workplace prediction. ADHD at work has always been uneven: great at the creative parts, taxed by the operational parts. Agents reverse that tax. People with ADHD plus an agent that actually knows their context do not become "normal" employees. They become obviously valuable ones.
ADHD is a spectrum, so one honesty note: this is my brain, not every ADHD brain. And please do not diagnose yourself from a blog post. The full post on Digital Thoughts covers the trade in detail, including what I have been doing about the bad part.
Read the full post: https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/adhd-ai-agent-personal-experience-2026
Originally published on Digital Thoughts (Substack).
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