i-have-adhd: a skill that stops AI coding agents from burying the answer
I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer
This GitHub project, i-have-adhd, provides a skill for AI coding assistants that forces them to give direct, actionable answers instead of verbose, hedged responses. It enforces rules like leading with the next action, numbering steps, and ending with a concrete next step. The skill is available for multiple agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode, and has gained significant traction with over 28k stars.
Action first. Steps numbered. No "Hope this helps!"
- jp57
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?
- ryandrake
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'."
- sleazebreeze
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.
- hbn
> 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?
- acaloiar
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.
- andai
>explain like I have executive dysfunction
This is true. Transformer has several orders of magnitude more working memory than any human. Compared to transformer we all have executive dysfunction.
By default they explain things assuming I have infinite processing bandwidth. I do not! I have several zeroes less than they do.
- hk1337
> 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".
- mzajc
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.