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!"
- 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.
- 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?
- 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?
- menthe
Seems everyone on Hacker News has already forgotten about Anthropic’s amazing new watermarking algorithm. You don’t need to look any further to understand why it writes so awfully - it literally swaps words programmatically all over the text from the result of a hash function…
- codetiger
Recent language Claude uses is very heavily loaded and hurts me when reading. So I had to use this to keep my sanity. This started only with Opus 5 where Anthropic thought they optimized the meaning per token and make it very hard to read. Comments and code also looks like cryptic.
- rochansinha
I went through the whole phase of
asd-ste100 -> caveman -> wait-what
And a few others..
Now I just use a vale lint script I made using what worked from the skills and lint the output (docs and scripts) and just ask it to write in plain technical English for its chat messages with full context.
Skills just make the entire process bloated beyond belief (apart from the needless context rot and token usage)
- 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".
- 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.
- mcv
Sounds useful. I'm often struggling with how extremely verbose Claude is. Shorter is better. Cut the unnecessary prose and the Claudian turns of phrase.
But this seems to focus very much on telling the user what to do, whereas usually I'm telling Claude what to do. It feels like this inverts the relationship and wants to turn me into a reverse centaur.
Wouldn't "lead with the answer" be better than "lead with the action"? But sometimes answers do require detail and explanation. I just want to get rid of all the unnecessary prose.