10 ms·

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

540 points by domhudson 26d ago

bethekind 26d ago
Still a great skill, but at this point, I just write "I have adhd, can you explain that again" or "I have adhd". Works great for compressing it ELI5, but less dumb
- ahknight 26d ago
  I end my user CLAUDE.md files with: "- I'm not always going to read every word, so end each summary message with a TLDR of what you found, what you recommend, and what you need from me." It works really well. Sol doesn't need it at all.
  - bethekind 26d ago
    Another favorite of fine is asking it read something then to tell me any "questions, comments concerns" it has. Great for getting the jist of articles fast.
tonymet 26d ago
“Be concise “
- dentemple 26d ago
  It doesn't quite work as well, or as consistently. Giving the agent some additional reason for why really does seem to help.
  - tonymet 26d ago
    i agree, but I'm certain fewer tokens are necessary
  - andrewshadura 26d ago
    Try "grug brain smol"
- wiseowise 26d ago
  That’s too boomer, bro. We ADHDmaxxing here, aight? I haven’t read anything longer than a couple of sentences that fit in one frame of a TikTok video frfr.
  - tonymet 24d ago
    ironically the prompt is too long for "ADHD"
mzajc 26d ago
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.
- 14u2c 26d ago
  Appears to be the evals. Those are part of the process for developing the skill text, not something that is distributed with the skill.
gerad 26d ago
Personally I ask it to explain it simply like it’s talking to an executive reading it on their phone while on another meeting.
- testycool 25d ago
  Haha, thanks I'll try this. I typically tell it to explain in one of the following ways: - as the grug brained developer - for smoothbrains - for high school reading level intern - in the style of Samuel L. Jackson
SandersAK 26d ago
love when they put stuff in like this... One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.
- ilivethere 26d ago
  the AGENTS.md says that file is specifically for agents working ON i-have-adhd. When you install the skill, only the contents of the skills/ is copied over...
egeozcan 26d ago
As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).
- spicyusername 26d ago
  I mean... like most spectrum disorders, most people experience and can relate to at least some of the core symptoms, even if they don't express the full spectrum or severity. So when someone says they feel like they have ADHD, they are probably not inaccurate.
  - egeozcan 26d ago
    No, great, I'm not offended or anything (why would I be), and I wish I could relate back, it's just a weird feeling, that's all.
    - spicyusername 26d ago
      No doubt. When you have it, ADHD is such a dominant factor in the way your life is organized and experienced, its not surprising that it can become a core part of your identity. I do think it's easy for those with it to over romanticize what it's like to not have it. The lack of ADHD isn't a magic bullet for success and good life outcomes. Like so many of life's real or perceived barriers, when one gets removed, you'll often find there is another one with a different shape just behind. The challenge, for anyone, is pressing forward anyways.
  - oceansweep 26d ago
    How can someone say they have a disease or affliction while not understanding what exactly that affliction is as opposed to what they think it is/have been informed by media/society/non-professionals?
    - spicyusername 26d ago
whirlwin 26d ago
Can someone explain why this is a agent skill and not just agent config (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md)?
- trio8453 26d ago
  It's a fashion choice.
- iambenm 26d ago
  You can /i-have-adhd when you get a wall of text and are exasperated. You don't always want the responses that it generates when you /i-have-adhd, and things in AGENTS.md tend to lose weight as context grows.
- drdexebtjl 26d ago
  It lets the author pretend to be doing software engineering, like running tests and deploying versions.
- throwaway613746 26d ago
  [dead]
- SamuelAdams 26d ago
  Skills are kind of a new thing starting around January 2026, but the spec was established about 12 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871173 Anyways the most layman way I’ve seen it explained is this: skills help save token usage for the right context. Not every request needs all instructions all the time - running tests is different than reviewing a PR, so why should the context window have instructions for both on every request? So now you split instructions into “skill” files, which are basically opinionated markdown files. And you invoke those with something like /grill-me in the prompt depending on what you’re doing. There are some steps to have the agent automatically know what to invoke for you but in my experience this automation is hit or miss. It is also challenging to keep track of a growing library of skills and keeping those up to date. So YMMV regarding skills. I typically keep things in a single markdown file even if the context window gets a bit bloated.
bentt 26d ago
I am deeply curious if there are people that would not benefit from this.
sleazebreeze 26d ago
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.
- klardotsh 26d ago
  GLM (both mainline and flash varieties), being trained to speak a very similar Claudeish, is also atrocious about this. My AGENTS.md demands all prose be in STE100, which is trying to solve a similar problem as the skill linked in OP. Getting GLM to STFU by AGENTS instruction is nigh impossible. I use a plugin for OMP/Pi to periodically inject system prompt reminders of output style, and it still largely ignores the request, dumping novels of jargon-dense prose every turn. DeepSeek v4 Flash isn’t much better (unsurprising- it’s an extremely stubborn model). Weirdly, GPT Luna excels at following this type of instruction from AGENTS.md, and never forgetting it, even 400k+ tokens into the context window.
  - bel8 26d ago
    yup. GPT Luna tends to keep things objective. Muse Spark 1.3 is also one of the better models in this aspect, for me.
- alwillis 26d ago
  Claude Code has output styles; one of the predefined styles is Concise [1]. Concise: Claude leads with the result, skips preamble and narration, and keeps responses short by default, while doing the engineering work as thoroughly as in the Default style. When you ask for an explanation or more detail, Claude answers in full. Claude always keeps the complete content of error reports, security warnings, and confirmations for destructive actions. Requires Claude Code v2.1.237 or later. [1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
hk1337 26d ago
> 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".
- sixothree 26d ago
  Or worse, buries an important detail somewhere in the text. Tangentially, over the weekend I had claude ask me if I wanted to continue with UIM-001. I couldn't find UIM-001 in any document it referenced creating or any text it had previously generated. Claude seems to be the worst about all of this stuff. Also, somehow over the weekend it responded with these sections all clearly laid out - What landed, Decisions I made and recorded, Two findings, and What you need to do. Not sure why it can't do that all the time.
- elboru 26d ago
  What bothers me is the last few lines where it notes something "important" that you NEED to pay attention to. Just to find out that it is something you already mentioned somewhere in the conversation or that is not related to the current work.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 26d ago
    I find it handy because often I just have to read the last few lines. All the above is usually just confirmation of what I asked.
- bsimpson 26d ago
  I often use Google Deep Research when I want it to actually go out and find an answer for me, but the prompt must have a high school essay requirement in there. Nothing I can do prevents it from giving me a page of background that tries to make the question sound important and interesting, even when it isn't. I usually follow up with an "I'm not reading all that" and make it summarize.
- undulation 26d ago
  I agree -- the name of this plugin is confusing and confused. The skill simply demands concise and well-formatted responses from an agent. It is something demanded by anybody daily-driving agents for their actual job since >75% of the text output from agents is fluff. THis would better be named `/i-wont-read-that-heap-of-garbage`
messh 26d ago
good skill. but why should all this repo e needed for a small MD file??
- dpark 26d ago
  A public repo is the easiest way to share something like this.
  - dymk 26d ago
    Nah that would be a link to a gist
    - dpark 26d ago
      I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.
- ihuman 26d ago
  If its on github, you can add it directly to your claude via the claude marketplace and manage updates within claude (or set it to auto-update)
cush 26d ago
I’ve had a lot better output from my agents since I added “I probably have ADHD” in my user context
pelagicAustral 26d ago
ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.
- nosioptar 26d ago
  Ive tried asking a yes/no question with something like "answer only with 'yes' or 'no'" and still have to chew the clanker piece of shit out four or five times to get it to folow instructions. Not to mention it almost always gets the wrong answer.
quietraster 26d ago
the 'burying the answer' framing is so accurate. does the
joduplessis 26d ago
This doesn't seem to be a big issue with Codex. Claude, yes - I have from time to time said "ffs one liner please".
bityard 26d ago
The README makes mention of The Adult ADHD Tool Kit by J. Russell Ramsay and Anthony L. Rostain which looks like a pretty good resource.
josefresco 26d ago
Does this not work? "Output styles" https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
- hungryhobbit 26d ago
  No, it does not.
  - 0xffff2 26d ago
    But also, this skill is basically the same thing as an output style, so it won't work either.
- CharlesW 26d ago
  Yes, a custom output style would be a more idiomatic (and likely more effective) way to implement this.
thefourthchime 26d ago
I asked my agent if I should install this because I already have a bunch of instructions that are similar. For example, if it's going to give me an answer that's longer than three paragraphs, I tell it to give me a TLDR at the end. This is what it gave me for this. "TL;DR: Skip the install. You already built a better version for your world. If numbered steps and "where are we?" restatements still feel missing, cherry-pick those into one short rule instead of adding another full skill on top."
VCFundedGenYer 26d ago
Every chat bot has this problem. If you don't tell it to respond tersely and without conversation, it will waste a billion tokens giving you a 5 paragraph manifesto of rambling and useless redundant information.
abathologist 26d ago
"Software Engineering" in 2026.
- rbtprograms 26d ago
  "AGI is here"
- neutrinobro 26d ago
  Can't read reads walls of text in Claude-ish prose? Sounds to me like you just have a SKILLS.md issue.
h4x0rr 26d ago
I found 2 things helping a lot: 1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure. 2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.
- vvpan 26d ago
  Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.
daksh_aneja 26d ago
[flagged]
ricksunny 26d ago
I look forward to the superpowered upgrade of this I-am-a-gnat-on-crack
jp57 26d ago
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?
- yuck39 26d ago
  I have always postulated that it was intentionally bad as to watermark its own output to avoid using it for training the next model.
- bgilroy26 26d ago
  You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
  - 8cvor6j844qw_d6 26d ago
    You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here. That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.
    - alaithea 26d ago
      And that tension matters.
      - cpill 26d ago
        [flagged]
      - charlieflowers 26d ago
        That tension is doing real work.
ryandrake 26d ago
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'."
- eterm 26d ago
  I've found it does this in two situations: Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR. But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else. It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.
  - bevr1337 25d ago
    This is a skill I learned as a coffee shop supervisor and youth camp counselor, and now I really practice it on Slack with half-interested product owners. - Always describe tasks in the positive. (Never describe tasks in the negative.) - DO guide the user safely. DO NOT use DO NOT because the reader already DID. - Give guided choices based on your expertise. - Asking two-or-more questions results in one-or-less answers. - Conditionals are also questions, so you only get one. I only use AI agents and tools for work, I don't create them, so I'm not a subject matter expert. Where I've anthropomorphized the tools highlights my own misunderstandings.
- nzach 26d ago
  My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition... You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important. In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.
heyiammallik 26d ago
I like the problem this is trying to solve. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether this kind of a preference should be a skill at all. Stuff like put the answer first, don't bury the useful bit etc feel like user level preferences that should survive across tasks. Agents.md is repo context, skills are useful when a particular task needs extra instructions but this is neither really. Right now we seem to be stuffing all 3 kinds of things into context hoping model pays attention to it where needed as session grows. Also +1 on not making this purely about shorter output
smusamashah 26d ago
Simply adding "Keep answers short, I have ADHD" should work same as this skill.
- newswasboring 26d ago
  Does it? I've tried so many versions of this in custom instructions.
agentdev001 26d ago
Until either of these cases happen: A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.
- arrowleaf 26d ago
  I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.
  - asdff 26d ago
    I'd be burned out too if 48k of my comp went to what amounts to a facilities spend. Crazy. You think the models actually give you ROI, or this is a sort of jumping with the lemmings thing your company is doing, and you could probably deliver the same output working in "The Old Way" with another 48k on top your base?
    - arrowleaf 26d ago
      My output is easily 2-3X what it was two years ago. With the introduction of Claude to everyone in the company (HR, finance, marketing, product, dev, etc), so came the expectations of what used to take 2 quarters can now be done in a couple sprints. I would be even more underwater working in "The Old Way" regardless of comp, with how deadlines are being set now. That being said, I don't know how long this will last, I'm not the only 'top talent' at the company facing warning signs of burnout. Longterm, I believe my total output would be higher working with minimal AI when you consider the impact to motivation and how long I anticipate staying with the company.
acaloiar 26d ago
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.
- saltypixel 26d ago
  [flagged]
hbn 26d ago
> Install > Copy/paste into your CLI prompt: > Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd 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?
- icantevenhold 26d ago
  No I also think it’s insane how normalised this has become
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 26d ago
  Always good to be paranoid. Even MCPs are not safe. For example Notion injected ads [1] to its official MCP connector to advertise products mid-task. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_official_mcp_connector_prompt_injects_ai/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_o...
  - seniorThrowaway 26d ago
    MCP is SOAP-XML without the contract or formal language, it's hilarious
    - 98codes 26d ago
      Nothing new under the sun
    - partyficial 25d ago
      it's the same tradeoff between : - rigidity vs flexibility - determinism vs creativity - conservative vs liberal - right vs left if you know exactly what you want and how to describe it, use SOAP-XML/REST etc. if you don't know exactly what you want or how to describe it, use LLM/MCP
WhyNotHugo 26d ago
You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".
- ranger_danger 26d ago
  My understanding is that's basically all this does. Thousands of lines of text just to add one sentence to the prompt.
vvpan 26d ago
Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.
cruffle_duffle 26d ago
Opus 5 is such a massive regression, I really don't understand how Anthropic green-lit it. It makes me wonder so much about the company. Like, did the people who work there actually have to suffer through it's absolutely unintelligible word salad like the rest of us? Or did they actually dogfood it and in-fact enjoyed its output? Or do none of them dogfood Opus because they are all sucking down Mythos-Max + Speed Boost or whatever every day and their only exposure to Opus 5 was as subagents? If it was my company, fixing the output would be the absolute top priority of the company. I'd be all over every channel admitting the massive fuckup, apologizing profusely, and working non-stop to push out a fix. Yet it's crickets from Anthropic. Is it simply growing pains of the company or is it a deep, systemic structural/cultural "thing" that led to this fucked up model getting released? Was it a cascading failure of models training models training models with almost no human oversight? Or was there human oversight and, again, people actually decided the way it responded was good? I hope it was the former not the later because I have no earthy clue who the fuck would look at what opus spews out into the console as good. Because to me, Opus 5 is completely unusable in almost any context. As a product, it fails to deliver value. I just don't understand it. I really honestly don't understand how the fuck Anthropic released it at all. And in a weird "meta" twist it makes me wonder how much of these LLM's are just smoke and mirrors and opus 5 output is basically the end state of what you get when you push them as far as they can go. It's some kind of twisted proof of "max complexity they can handle and deliver" and opus 5 walked to the edge and went over and it's slop output is demonstrating.... something.... about the limits of large language models. I dunno. But what I do know is it caused me to subscribe to Codex. No 1m context window, the harness isn't nearly as polished, but at least their models don't return condescending, unintelligible word salad.
IshKebab 26d ago
I solved this by switching from Claude to Codex. It's crazy how much faster it is to reply and how much less verbose its replies are. Dunno why Claude is popular at all...
- djmips 26d ago
  Intertia. Codex wasn't as good at coding until Astra dropped.
hinkley 26d ago
Might I suggest you instead call this Executive Summary? It's not just neurodiverse people who would like to get to the fucking point sooner and the explanations afterward. All of us have other shit we need to be doing.
TZubiri 26d ago
this feels like the opposite of skill
andai 26d ago
>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.
- beckhamc 26d ago
  Pretty much this. I actually find this more annoying than the way it writes, but that is also annoying as well.
mjsarfatti 26d ago
You don’t need a skill. Just tell it to BLUF (bottom line up front) and ASD-STE100. And stop using Opus 9 Pro Max XHigh 10.0 for everything. If you choose a hyper-thinking model for asking the weather you can’t but expect yapping.
- 0xffff2 26d ago
  How do you actually incorporate these into your prompt? Because I've tried and I've seen many others try and report that it does not work well, especially over long sessions. I also don't know how much to trust the model, but I've had the model tell me specifically that certain aspects of ASD-STE100 are unactionable and will just create more noise. The OP's own skill even leads with something in a very similar vein: > These rules apply to every response for the rest of the session, not only this one. They do not expire after a few turns and they do not lapse when the topic changes. My understanding is that phrases like this are at best a _very_ weak signal to the model. It's simply contradictory to how the model works at a level that can't be overridden by injecting tokens.
  - mjsarfatti 26d ago
    Weak is even giving it too much credit imho, a yapping skill telling Claude to not yap can’t but fail. I placed those instructions in setting > personal instructions, in my global CLAUDE.md, and in each project’s CLAUDE.md. I also use the concise output style in CC. If I choose a high thinking model it will start deviating in long sessions, then I just remind it in my next message: “Remember ASD-STE100 style. [rest of my message]” BLUF sticks a lot easier than STE to be honest… but Claude knows what STE is, and using the “ASD-STE100 style” locution avoids the compliance issue (it’s true that strict ASD-STE100 compliance isn’t really possible, nor desired)
- code_biologist 26d ago
  There's no physical reason "smartest/most capable model" should be "most yappy model". Smart people can write concisely. It's unfortunate you have to tolerate/fight yappiness to get intelligence with current SotA models.
0xffff2 26d ago
From the "10 rules": > Specific time estimates (minutes, not "a bit"). I actually wish the model would go completely in the opposite direction. Except in the rare circumstances where the model has actually measured something, it is hilariously deficient in its concept of time. It will often output phrases like "this relates to <thing> that you did weeks ago", referring to something that happened in the session just a few turns (and hours or a couple of days) ago. Likewise for estimating how long a coding tasks takes, it is hilariously inept. It honestly feels like it rolls two completely independent dice to select a number and a value from (hours | days | weeks) when it needs to attach an estimate to something. I'd much rather read "a bit" than be distracted by these utterly nonsensical times. The full skill gives this example: >Bad: "This will take some work." Good: "About 15 minutes if tests already cover this. An afternoon if not." My experience is that it is very likely that whatever task this is describing takes anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes, consistently. Maybe I just work way faster than the average person.
jasonlotito 26d ago
Why is this a skill? It should be an output setting, so you can just set your output to this, and that's it. You don't have to run the skill every time. Go into settings and look up outputs, and just set it up there. As a skill, it's worthless.
paretolaw 26d ago
If claude only did what we tell him...
loloquwowndueo 26d ago
I just tell Claude itself to summarize its walls of text. Works pretty well.
Banditoz 26d ago
How do these repos always have so many stars and forks? Roughly 1,800 forks, but only 40ish unique authors? Almost 30,000 stars? Something fishy is going on...
ocd 26d ago
Concerned this will negatively impact people who really have these mental disorders who provided that information in CLAUDE.md to make AI usable for them. It's bad enough how many false diagnoses and drugs for these conditions are handed out to drug seekers, but potential poisoning of the well on how LLMs handle this information going forward could be extremely disruptive to people who have real daily living issues instead of "10xing productivity."
- plufz 26d ago
  Im not 100% following. ADHD-type adjustments of information is usually the type of changes that make information more accessible for everyone. There are studies on how classes thst where adjusted because one student have adhd have improved all students performance. So it seems quite different from incorrect medication? Or am i misunderstanding you?
- Toutouxc 26d ago
  It’s true that my first thought, as someone with actual diagnosed ADHD, was “how the hell is this related to ADHD?”.
flerchin 26d ago
In my experience I get better work output out of claude if I don't constrain its conversational style. I want Claude to stop saying how "absolutely right" I am, or the new hotness "honest take", but I get better code if I let it do that annoying stuff. Yes, that makes me fight ADHD harder.
altern8 26d ago
With Claude—and I feel Opus 5 in particular—I always feel like I'm talking in circles. Just when I think the task is finally done, it mentions a caveat that might invalidate the whole thing. Or it adds a hint at the end about something that it didn't look into but might be a potential problem. ALWAYS. If I ask a yes/no question, it's always a short novel that barely answers the question and adds 3-4 side quests. It's exhausting. Luckily I get paid for it but Jesus Christ, can't they see how annoying it is to use the thing? What were they thinking
- code_biologist 26d ago
  Opus 4.7/4.8/5 have a built-in nitpicking as anti-syphcophancy. Fable too. The models are structurally incapable of not nipicking. I suspect the nitpicking helps engagement metrics and it doesn't harm RLVF outcomes, so there's just not good signal against it.
al_borland 26d ago
I’ve been scolding my LLM quite a bit lately for this. Instead of telling me what to do, it first tells me 3 ways that might technically work, but I probably shouldn’t use for various reasons. This is all a waste of my time, tokens, and sanity.
- NewJazz 26d ago
  They bill per token, what do you expect?
sheetlite_74536 26d ago
[flagged]
nate 26d ago
I've installed multiple of these skills. but it seems to quickly revert to crappy writing. i've tried the adhd. the brain fried at the end of day. the "Concise" output from the harness itself. the most useful fix to me has been yelling at it "Speak English!! No jargon!!!" it goes back to more concise talking for a little while. Fable 5.1 is better at this so far though. :(
kulahan 26d ago
>ADHD-friendly outputs. No ADHD diagnosis needed! Don't worry, that's how it works in the real world, too.
TomGarden 26d ago
My most used follow-ups with Opus 5 are "one thing at a time" and "too much text". Really hope they figure this thing out
docjay 26d ago
Style requests tend to get washed away by context. I’m not sure how you’d do it with Claude Code or whatever (I use the API directly), but you might try fiddling with giving it a function called “response” or “message_user” with a mandatory parameter like “output=plaintext”. I’m basing that idea on custom functions I give Claude where I designate the style in the required parameters. Example: “”” @pyrepl(code_golf=True, output=CSV) //END “”” The “//END” is a special terminator I use for halting the response. Claude runs code between the tags. The difference in code is incredible. No banners, comments, fluff, print(“=“*70), or any other nonsense, and the code is tight and compact. The parameters do nothing, Claude just outputs them as part of required syntax and it dictates the style purely because it output them.
MetaWhirledPeas 26d ago
I like "tersely". "Tersely, what are today's headlines?" I admit I don't personally orchestrate agents, but I imagine something like this would work: "Tersely, write up plans for agents to implement this feature. Begin each of your agent instructions with 'Tersely,'." I guess in addition to terse wording you'd get terse code? Which ain't such a bad thing.
latentsea 26d ago
Kinda offensive name to some of us btw.
hacker_homie 26d ago
Skills still confuse me, why isn't this just a repo with a single md file. why does it need js to load a md file.
- josh_p 26d ago
  It mostly doesn't depending on the harness you're using the skill with. The author turned it into a pi extension, for example, in the `extensions` folder in the repo. Users of pi can enable and disable the skill with a slash command. I saw some other harnesses supported.
bytesage 26d ago
[flagged]
hbbio 26d ago
Just in case the model has ADHD too, I am using a minified version of it: https://gist.github.com/hbbio/2faf096cbb77e197233ab9a2958beb68 https://gist.github.com/hbbio/2faf096cbb77e197233ab9a2958beb...
visarga 26d ago
I use the /s4 skill "simple short synthetic style". Just 4 words, easy to remember the formula.
ilitirit 26d ago
I still use GPT 5.5 daily. It doesn't seem to have this problem. It just gives me a concise summary and gets to work.
vipipiccf 26d ago
[flagged]
runtime_lens 26d ago
[dead]
lucaprata 26d ago
[flagged]
rochansinha 26d ago
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)
mcv 26d ago
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.
halilBB 26d ago
[flagged]
codetiger 26d ago
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.
menthe 26d ago
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…
- pona-a 26d ago
  This was an issue before watermarking was publically announced. I'm also not an expert, but aren't bits of a hash indistinguishible from uniform randomness?
  - LoganDark 25d ago
    Depends on the particular hash. Some hashes are designed to produce similar outputs when the input data is similar (for example, SSDeep). I'd imagine hashes designed to survive light copywriting would also not be entirely indistinguishable from random.
dogscatstrees 25d ago
I want to thank the author for this. The difference is night and day. It's not just for adhd, it's just a really practical output in general. To get it to fully work though, it has to be asserted at every turn in the session. That reminder in the skill is negligible in tokens but uses extra nonetheless. I hope the scientists at Anthropic can figure this out, it's not simply an output style flag.
TheLudd 25d ago
I'll try this out. Just find it amusing that a skill file has * A repo with 61 files * 80% python
ankithg 25d ago
[flagged]
kestrelquant 25d ago
[flagged]
black3r 25d ago
> 3. End with one concrete next step. I mean maybe I have ADHD idk i'm not diagnosed, I don't generally have issues understanding Claude's output (even though I do think it's unnecessarily verbose), but I think this one is a general good advice which Claude ignores for some reason, and is especially annoying during debugging sessions, where it asks for 3 outputs, I paste one for it to process while getting the others, and then it immediately forgets it wanted the 2 others, and starts cooking up some wrong conclusions...
poulpy123 25d ago
In the example, I notice that only the original answer explain what is the issue. In this specific case it may be trivial, but I prefer to read something too verbose that explain things than just following instructions blindly (especially if it's for telling twice in a row to open the same file at the same line :D.
one-bank4326 25d ago
[flagged]
saidnooneever 25d ago
i am glad Astra seems yo recognise this type of stuff better and suggest alternatives or even measurements. i got in its instructions since forever that i will get overexcited about ideas and they might need more scrutiny than what i can give them. not sure if it has impact but i felt it was needed :p
SMAAART 25d ago
I don't have ADHD, but I do prefer lists to verbose narratives. I am going to start using this.
stevenhubertron 25d ago
Doesn’t work
3581592986 25d ago
[flagged]
Nevermark 25d ago
I have ADHD, and I approve this task's rules! Side note, because I recently gave my AI the skill of speaking with proper 4th grade grammar, wherever that suffices, to reign in recent redundant, over complex, and indirect speech styles. > 5. A rule fights the task. When a rule would delete the answer itself, the task wins; the shape stays. [...] Unnecessary redundancy, "answer itself" -> "answer". (Pervasive "the X's own" and "the X itself" flourishes kill me.) Unnecessary analogies, indirect reference, "rule fights", "the shape stays". Unnecessarily split up sentences, the whole quote. Unnecessary words, the whole quote. My feedback would have been: >> 5. When a rule interferes with a task, the task wins. [...] (Not critiquing OP. But I just spent half a day correcting sentences exactly like this, to get the 4th Grade Grammar skill working properly and this sentence triggered me! Streams of sentences like that compound in communication complexity and ambiguity.)
holdout-labs 25d ago
[flagged]
oldandboring 25d ago
I am [undiagnosed] high-functioning ASD Level 1, I have high "intelligence" and very strong pattern recognition but slow "processing speed". As a result I am quickly overwhelmed by having too much information presented at once; when presented with lots of "threads" my brain tries to follow them all at once and just melts down. As a result, Claude's default behavior (as a coding agent) is basically engineered to slow me down. Skills like this definitely help, to the extent that the agent respects them as context grows.
ghm2199 25d ago
One thing i am curious about is if anyone who is fluent in a romance language(en/es/fr etc) but their native language was a non-romance one(e.g. japanese or hindi) felt it better using the latter exclusively?
suburban_strike 25d ago
"Explain it like I'm autistic" achieves similar ends.
MetroWind 25d ago
Does it really need that many files?
ayghri 24d ago
- This skill started as a joke after getting frustrated with LLM verbosity, which was causing me "brain fry" - It is good for working on things you already understand and know well and you just wanna get things done. - It is not good for exploration and learning, as you have to read long content to achieve the goal. - Reducing token usage is not a target. - Repository is mostly evals and benchmark code + translations.
danielmai 16d ago
[flagged]

540 points by domhudson 26d ago

Still a great skill, but at this point, I just write "I have adhd, can you explain that again" or "I have adhd". Works great for compressing it ELI5, but less dumb

ahknight 26d ago
I end my user CLAUDE.md files with: "- I'm not always going to read every word, so end each summary message with a TLDR of what you found, what you recommend, and what you need from me." It works really well. Sol doesn't need it at all.
- bethekind 26d ago
  Another favorite of fine is asking it read something then to tell me any "questions, comments concerns" it has. Great for getting the jist of articles fast.

tonymet 26d ago

“Be concise “

dentemple 26d ago
It doesn't quite work as well, or as consistently. Giving the agent some additional reason for why really does seem to help.
- tonymet 26d ago
  i agree, but I'm certain fewer tokens are necessary
- andrewshadura 26d ago
  Try "grug brain smol"
wiseowise 26d ago
That’s too boomer, bro. We ADHDmaxxing here, aight? I haven’t read anything longer than a couple of sentences that fit in one frame of a TikTok video frfr.
- tonymet 24d ago
  ironically the prompt is too long for "ADHD"

mzajc 26d ago

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.

14u2c 26d ago
Appears to be the evals. Those are part of the process for developing the skill text, not something that is distributed with the skill.

gerad 26d ago

Personally I ask it to explain it simply like it’s talking to an executive reading it on their phone while on another meeting.

testycool 25d ago
Haha, thanks I'll try this. I typically tell it to explain in one of the following ways: - as the grug brained developer - for smoothbrains - for high school reading level intern - in the style of Samuel L. Jackson

SandersAK 26d ago

love when they put stuff in like this... One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.

ilivethere 26d ago
the AGENTS.md says that file is specifically for agents working ON i-have-adhd. When you install the skill, only the contents of the skills/ is copied over...

egeozcan 26d ago

As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).

spicyusername 26d ago
I mean... like most spectrum disorders, most people experience and can relate to at least some of the core symptoms, even if they don't express the full spectrum or severity. So when someone says they feel like they have ADHD, they are probably not inaccurate.
- egeozcan 26d ago
  No, great, I'm not offended or anything (why would I be), and I wish I could relate back, it's just a weird feeling, that's all.
  - spicyusername 26d ago
    No doubt. When you have it, ADHD is such a dominant factor in the way your life is organized and experienced, its not surprising that it can become a core part of your identity. I do think it's easy for those with it to over romanticize what it's like to not have it. The lack of ADHD isn't a magic bullet for success and good life outcomes. Like so many of life's real or perceived barriers, when one gets removed, you'll often find there is another one with a different shape just behind. The challenge, for anyone, is pressing forward anyways.
- oceansweep 26d ago
  How can someone say they have a disease or affliction while not understanding what exactly that affliction is as opposed to what they think it is/have been informed by media/society/non-professionals?
  - spicyusername 26d ago

whirlwin 26d ago

Can someone explain why this is a agent skill and not just agent config (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md)?

trio8453 26d ago
It's a fashion choice.
iambenm 26d ago
You can /i-have-adhd when you get a wall of text and are exasperated. You don't always want the responses that it generates when you /i-have-adhd, and things in AGENTS.md tend to lose weight as context grows.
drdexebtjl 26d ago
It lets the author pretend to be doing software engineering, like running tests and deploying versions.
throwaway613746 26d ago
[dead]
SamuelAdams 26d ago
Skills are kind of a new thing starting around January 2026, but the spec was established about 12 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871173 Anyways the most layman way I’ve seen it explained is this: skills help save token usage for the right context. Not every request needs all instructions all the time - running tests is different than reviewing a PR, so why should the context window have instructions for both on every request? So now you split instructions into “skill” files, which are basically opinionated markdown files. And you invoke those with something like /grill-me in the prompt depending on what you’re doing. There are some steps to have the agent automatically know what to invoke for you but in my experience this automation is hit or miss. It is also challenging to keep track of a growing library of skills and keeping those up to date. So YMMV regarding skills. I typically keep things in a single markdown file even if the context window gets a bit bloated.

bentt 26d ago

I am deeply curious if there are people that would not benefit from this.

sleazebreeze 26d ago

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.

klardotsh 26d ago
GLM (both mainline and flash varieties), being trained to speak a very similar Claudeish, is also atrocious about this. My AGENTS.md demands all prose be in STE100, which is trying to solve a similar problem as the skill linked in OP. Getting GLM to STFU by AGENTS instruction is nigh impossible. I use a plugin for OMP/Pi to periodically inject system prompt reminders of output style, and it still largely ignores the request, dumping novels of jargon-dense prose every turn. DeepSeek v4 Flash isn’t much better (unsurprising- it’s an extremely stubborn model). Weirdly, GPT Luna excels at following this type of instruction from AGENTS.md, and never forgetting it, even 400k+ tokens into the context window.
- bel8 26d ago
  yup. GPT Luna tends to keep things objective. Muse Spark 1.3 is also one of the better models in this aspect, for me.
alwillis 26d ago
Claude Code has output styles; one of the predefined styles is Concise [1]. Concise: Claude leads with the result, skips preamble and narration, and keeps responses short by default, while doing the engineering work as thoroughly as in the Default style. When you ask for an explanation or more detail, Claude answers in full. Claude always keeps the complete content of error reports, security warnings, and confirmations for destructive actions. Requires Claude Code v2.1.237 or later. [1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

hk1337 26d ago

> 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".

sixothree 26d ago
Or worse, buries an important detail somewhere in the text. Tangentially, over the weekend I had claude ask me if I wanted to continue with UIM-001. I couldn't find UIM-001 in any document it referenced creating or any text it had previously generated. Claude seems to be the worst about all of this stuff. Also, somehow over the weekend it responded with these sections all clearly laid out - What landed, Decisions I made and recorded, Two findings, and What you need to do. Not sure why it can't do that all the time.
elboru 26d ago
What bothers me is the last few lines where it notes something "important" that you NEED to pay attention to. Just to find out that it is something you already mentioned somewhere in the conversation or that is not related to the current work.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 26d ago
  I find it handy because often I just have to read the last few lines. All the above is usually just confirmation of what I asked.
bsimpson 26d ago
I often use Google Deep Research when I want it to actually go out and find an answer for me, but the prompt must have a high school essay requirement in there. Nothing I can do prevents it from giving me a page of background that tries to make the question sound important and interesting, even when it isn't. I usually follow up with an "I'm not reading all that" and make it summarize.
undulation 26d ago
I agree -- the name of this plugin is confusing and confused. The skill simply demands concise and well-formatted responses from an agent. It is something demanded by anybody daily-driving agents for their actual job since >75% of the text output from agents is fluff. THis would better be named `/i-wont-read-that-heap-of-garbage`

messh 26d ago

good skill. but why should all this repo e needed for a small MD file??

dpark 26d ago
A public repo is the easiest way to share something like this.
- dymk 26d ago
  Nah that would be a link to a gist
  - dpark 26d ago
    I suppose that’s also reasonable, though this particular repo also hosts evals and other content related to the skill. So a gist seems like it would be an addition, not a replacement.
ihuman 26d ago
If its on github, you can add it directly to your claude via the claude marketplace and manage updates within claude (or set it to auto-update)

cush 26d ago

I’ve had a lot better output from my agents since I added “I probably have ADHD” in my user context

pelagicAustral 26d ago

ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.

nosioptar 26d ago
Ive tried asking a yes/no question with something like "answer only with 'yes' or 'no'" and still have to chew the clanker piece of shit out four or five times to get it to folow instructions. Not to mention it almost always gets the wrong answer.

quietraster 26d ago

the 'burying the answer' framing is so accurate. does the

joduplessis 26d ago

This doesn't seem to be a big issue with Codex. Claude, yes - I have from time to time said "ffs one liner please".

bityard 26d ago

The README makes mention of The Adult ADHD Tool Kit by J. Russell Ramsay and Anthony L. Rostain which looks like a pretty good resource.

josefresco 26d ago

Does this not work? "Output styles" https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

hungryhobbit 26d ago
No, it does not.
- 0xffff2 26d ago
  But also, this skill is basically the same thing as an output style, so it won't work either.
CharlesW 26d ago
Yes, a custom output style would be a more idiomatic (and likely more effective) way to implement this.

thefourthchime 26d ago

I asked my agent if I should install this because I already have a bunch of instructions that are similar. For example, if it's going to give me an answer that's longer than three paragraphs, I tell it to give me a TLDR at the end. This is what it gave me for this. "TL;DR: Skip the install. You already built a better version for your world. If numbered steps and "where are we?" restatements still feel missing, cherry-pick those into one short rule instead of adding another full skill on top."

VCFundedGenYer 26d ago

Every chat bot has this problem. If you don't tell it to respond tersely and without conversation, it will waste a billion tokens giving you a 5 paragraph manifesto of rambling and useless redundant information.

abathologist 26d ago

"Software Engineering" in 2026.

rbtprograms 26d ago
"AGI is here"
neutrinobro 26d ago
Can't read reads walls of text in Claude-ish prose? Sounds to me like you just have a SKILLS.md issue.

h4x0rr 26d ago

I found 2 things helping a lot: 1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure. 2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.

vvpan 26d ago
Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.

daksh_aneja 26d ago

[flagged]

ricksunny 26d ago

I look forward to the superpowered upgrade of this I-am-a-gnat-on-crack

jp57 26d ago

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?

yuck39 26d ago
I have always postulated that it was intentionally bad as to watermark its own output to avoid using it for training the next model.
bgilroy26 26d ago
You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 26d ago
  You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here. That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.
  - alaithea 26d ago
    And that tension matters.
    - cpill 26d ago
      [flagged]
    - charlieflowers 26d ago
      That tension is doing real work.

ryandrake 26d ago

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'."

eterm 26d ago
I've found it does this in two situations: Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR. But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else. It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.
- bevr1337 25d ago
  This is a skill I learned as a coffee shop supervisor and youth camp counselor, and now I really practice it on Slack with half-interested product owners. - Always describe tasks in the positive. (Never describe tasks in the negative.) - DO guide the user safely. DO NOT use DO NOT because the reader already DID. - Give guided choices based on your expertise. - Asking two-or-more questions results in one-or-less answers. - Conditionals are also questions, so you only get one. I only use AI agents and tools for work, I don't create them, so I'm not a subject matter expert. Where I've anthropomorphized the tools highlights my own misunderstandings.
nzach 26d ago
My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition... You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important. In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.

heyiammallik 26d ago

I like the problem this is trying to solve. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether this kind of a preference should be a skill at all. Stuff like put the answer first, don't bury the useful bit etc feel like user level preferences that should survive across tasks. Agents.md is repo context, skills are useful when a particular task needs extra instructions but this is neither really. Right now we seem to be stuffing all 3 kinds of things into context hoping model pays attention to it where needed as session grows. Also +1 on not making this purely about shorter output

smusamashah 26d ago

Simply adding "Keep answers short, I have ADHD" should work same as this skill.

newswasboring 26d ago
Does it? I've tried so many versions of this in custom instructions.

agentdev001 26d ago

Until either of these cases happen: A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.

arrowleaf 26d ago
I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.
- asdff 26d ago
  I'd be burned out too if 48k of my comp went to what amounts to a facilities spend. Crazy. You think the models actually give you ROI, or this is a sort of jumping with the lemmings thing your company is doing, and you could probably deliver the same output working in "The Old Way" with another 48k on top your base?
  - arrowleaf 26d ago
    My output is easily 2-3X what it was two years ago. With the introduction of Claude to everyone in the company (HR, finance, marketing, product, dev, etc), so came the expectations of what used to take 2 quarters can now be done in a couple sprints. I would be even more underwater working in "The Old Way" regardless of comp, with how deadlines are being set now. That being said, I don't know how long this will last, I'm not the only 'top talent' at the company facing warning signs of burnout. Longterm, I believe my total output would be higher working with minimal AI when you consider the impact to motivation and how long I anticipate staying with the company.

acaloiar 26d ago

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.

saltypixel 26d ago
[flagged]

hbn 26d ago

> Install > Copy/paste into your CLI prompt: > Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd 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?

icantevenhold 26d ago
No I also think it’s insane how normalised this has become
8cvor6j844qw_d6 26d ago
Always good to be paranoid. Even MCPs are not safe. For example Notion injected ads [1] to its official MCP connector to advertise products mid-task. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_official_mcp_connector_prompt_injects_ai/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_o...
- seniorThrowaway 26d ago
  MCP is SOAP-XML without the contract or formal language, it's hilarious
  - 98codes 26d ago
    Nothing new under the sun
  - partyficial 25d ago
    it's the same tradeoff between : - rigidity vs flexibility - determinism vs creativity - conservative vs liberal - right vs left if you know exactly what you want and how to describe it, use SOAP-XML/REST etc. if you don't know exactly what you want or how to describe it, use LLM/MCP

WhyNotHugo 26d ago

You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".

ranger_danger 26d ago
My understanding is that's basically all this does. Thousands of lines of text just to add one sentence to the prompt.

vvpan 26d ago

Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.

cruffle_duffle 26d ago

Opus 5 is such a massive regression, I really don't understand how Anthropic green-lit it. It makes me wonder so much about the company. Like, did the people who work there actually have to suffer through it's absolutely unintelligible word salad like the rest of us? Or did they actually dogfood it and in-fact enjoyed its output? Or do none of them dogfood Opus because they are all sucking down Mythos-Max + Speed Boost or whatever every day and their only exposure to Opus 5 was as subagents? If it was my company, fixing the output would be the absolute top priority of the company. I'd be all over every channel admitting the massive fuckup, apologizing profusely, and working non-stop to push out a fix. Yet it's crickets from Anthropic. Is it simply growing pains of the company or is it a deep, systemic structural/cultural "thing" that led to this fucked up model getting released? Was it a cascading failure of models training models training models with almost no human oversight? Or was there human oversight and, again, people actually decided the way it responded was good? I hope it was the former not the later because I have no earthy clue who the fuck would look at what opus spews out into the console as good. Because to me, Opus 5 is completely unusable in almost any context. As a product, it fails to deliver value. I just don't understand it. I really honestly don't understand how the fuck Anthropic released it at all. And in a weird "meta" twist it makes me wonder how much of these LLM's are just smoke and mirrors and opus 5 output is basically the end state of what you get when you push them as far as they can go. It's some kind of twisted proof of "max complexity they can handle and deliver" and opus 5 walked to the edge and went over and it's slop output is demonstrating.... something.... about the limits of large language models. I dunno. But what I do know is it caused me to subscribe to Codex. No 1m context window, the harness isn't nearly as polished, but at least their models don't return condescending, unintelligible word salad.

IshKebab 26d ago

I solved this by switching from Claude to Codex. It's crazy how much faster it is to reply and how much less verbose its replies are. Dunno why Claude is popular at all...

djmips 26d ago
Intertia. Codex wasn't as good at coding until Astra dropped.

hinkley 26d ago

Might I suggest you instead call this Executive Summary? It's not just neurodiverse people who would like to get to the fucking point sooner and the explanations afterward. All of us have other shit we need to be doing.

TZubiri 26d ago

this feels like the opposite of skill

andai 26d ago

>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.

beckhamc 26d ago
Pretty much this. I actually find this more annoying than the way it writes, but that is also annoying as well.

mjsarfatti 26d ago

You don’t need a skill. Just tell it to BLUF (bottom line up front) and ASD-STE100. And stop using Opus 9 Pro Max XHigh 10.0 for everything. If you choose a hyper-thinking model for asking the weather you can’t but expect yapping.

0xffff2 26d ago
How do you actually incorporate these into your prompt? Because I've tried and I've seen many others try and report that it does not work well, especially over long sessions. I also don't know how much to trust the model, but I've had the model tell me specifically that certain aspects of ASD-STE100 are unactionable and will just create more noise. The OP's own skill even leads with something in a very similar vein: > These rules apply to every response for the rest of the session, not only this one. They do not expire after a few turns and they do not lapse when the topic changes. My understanding is that phrases like this are at best a _very_ weak signal to the model. It's simply contradictory to how the model works at a level that can't be overridden by injecting tokens.
- mjsarfatti 26d ago
  Weak is even giving it too much credit imho, a yapping skill telling Claude to not yap can’t but fail. I placed those instructions in setting > personal instructions, in my global CLAUDE.md, and in each project’s CLAUDE.md. I also use the concise output style in CC. If I choose a high thinking model it will start deviating in long sessions, then I just remind it in my next message: “Remember ASD-STE100 style. [rest of my message]” BLUF sticks a lot easier than STE to be honest… but Claude knows what STE is, and using the “ASD-STE100 style” locution avoids the compliance issue (it’s true that strict ASD-STE100 compliance isn’t really possible, nor desired)
code_biologist 26d ago
There's no physical reason "smartest/most capable model" should be "most yappy model". Smart people can write concisely. It's unfortunate you have to tolerate/fight yappiness to get intelligence with current SotA models.

0xffff2 26d ago

From the "10 rules": > Specific time estimates (minutes, not "a bit"). I actually wish the model would go completely in the opposite direction. Except in the rare circumstances where the model has actually measured something, it is hilariously deficient in its concept of time. It will often output phrases like "this relates to <thing> that you did weeks ago", referring to something that happened in the session just a few turns (and hours or a couple of days) ago. Likewise for estimating how long a coding tasks takes, it is hilariously inept. It honestly feels like it rolls two completely independent dice to select a number and a value from (hours | days | weeks) when it needs to attach an estimate to something. I'd much rather read "a bit" than be distracted by these utterly nonsensical times. The full skill gives this example: >Bad: "This will take some work." Good: "About 15 minutes if tests already cover this. An afternoon if not." My experience is that it is very likely that whatever task this is describing takes anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes, consistently. Maybe I just work way faster than the average person.

jasonlotito 26d ago

Why is this a skill? It should be an output setting, so you can just set your output to this, and that's it. You don't have to run the skill every time. Go into settings and look up outputs, and just set it up there. As a skill, it's worthless.

paretolaw 26d ago

If claude only did what we tell him...

loloquwowndueo 26d ago

I just tell Claude itself to summarize its walls of text. Works pretty well.

Banditoz 26d ago

How do these repos always have so many stars and forks? Roughly 1,800 forks, but only 40ish unique authors? Almost 30,000 stars? Something fishy is going on...

ocd 26d ago

Concerned this will negatively impact people who really have these mental disorders who provided that information in CLAUDE.md to make AI usable for them. It's bad enough how many false diagnoses and drugs for these conditions are handed out to drug seekers, but potential poisoning of the well on how LLMs handle this information going forward could be extremely disruptive to people who have real daily living issues instead of "10xing productivity."

plufz 26d ago
Im not 100% following. ADHD-type adjustments of information is usually the type of changes that make information more accessible for everyone. There are studies on how classes thst where adjusted because one student have adhd have improved all students performance. So it seems quite different from incorrect medication? Or am i misunderstanding you?
Toutouxc 26d ago
It’s true that my first thought, as someone with actual diagnosed ADHD, was “how the hell is this related to ADHD?”.

flerchin 26d ago

In my experience I get better work output out of claude if I don't constrain its conversational style. I want Claude to stop saying how "absolutely right" I am, or the new hotness "honest take", but I get better code if I let it do that annoying stuff. Yes, that makes me fight ADHD harder.

altern8 26d ago

With Claude—and I feel Opus 5 in particular—I always feel like I'm talking in circles. Just when I think the task is finally done, it mentions a caveat that might invalidate the whole thing. Or it adds a hint at the end about something that it didn't look into but might be a potential problem. ALWAYS. If I ask a yes/no question, it's always a short novel that barely answers the question and adds 3-4 side quests. It's exhausting. Luckily I get paid for it but Jesus Christ, can't they see how annoying it is to use the thing? What were they thinking

code_biologist 26d ago
Opus 4.7/4.8/5 have a built-in nitpicking as anti-syphcophancy. Fable too. The models are structurally incapable of not nipicking. I suspect the nitpicking helps engagement metrics and it doesn't harm RLVF outcomes, so there's just not good signal against it.

al_borland 26d ago

I’ve been scolding my LLM quite a bit lately for this. Instead of telling me what to do, it first tells me 3 ways that might technically work, but I probably shouldn’t use for various reasons. This is all a waste of my time, tokens, and sanity.

NewJazz 26d ago
They bill per token, what do you expect?

sheetlite_74536 26d ago

[flagged]

nate 26d ago

I've installed multiple of these skills. but it seems to quickly revert to crappy writing. i've tried the adhd. the brain fried at the end of day. the "Concise" output from the harness itself. the most useful fix to me has been yelling at it "Speak English!! No jargon!!!" it goes back to more concise talking for a little while. Fable 5.1 is better at this so far though. :(

kulahan 26d ago

>ADHD-friendly outputs. No ADHD diagnosis needed! Don't worry, that's how it works in the real world, too.

TomGarden 26d ago

My most used follow-ups with Opus 5 are "one thing at a time" and "too much text". Really hope they figure this thing out

docjay 26d ago

Style requests tend to get washed away by context. I’m not sure how you’d do it with Claude Code or whatever (I use the API directly), but you might try fiddling with giving it a function called “response” or “message_user” with a mandatory parameter like “output=plaintext”. I’m basing that idea on custom functions I give Claude where I designate the style in the required parameters. Example: “”” @pyrepl(code_golf=True, output=CSV) //END “”” The “//END” is a special terminator I use for halting the response. Claude runs code between the tags. The difference in code is incredible. No banners, comments, fluff, print(“=“*70), or any other nonsense, and the code is tight and compact. The parameters do nothing, Claude just outputs them as part of required syntax and it dictates the style purely because it output them.

MetaWhirledPeas 26d ago

I like "tersely". "Tersely, what are today's headlines?" I admit I don't personally orchestrate agents, but I imagine something like this would work: "Tersely, write up plans for agents to implement this feature. Begin each of your agent instructions with 'Tersely,'." I guess in addition to terse wording you'd get terse code? Which ain't such a bad thing.

latentsea 26d ago

Kinda offensive name to some of us btw.

hacker_homie 26d ago

Skills still confuse me, why isn't this just a repo with a single md file. why does it need js to load a md file.

josh_p 26d ago
It mostly doesn't depending on the harness you're using the skill with. The author turned it into a pi extension, for example, in the `extensions` folder in the repo. Users of pi can enable and disable the skill with a slash command. I saw some other harnesses supported.

bytesage 26d ago

[flagged]

hbbio 26d ago

Just in case the model has ADHD too, I am using a minified version of it: https://gist.github.com/hbbio/2faf096cbb77e197233ab9a2958beb68 https://gist.github.com/hbbio/2faf096cbb77e197233ab9a2958beb...

visarga 26d ago

I use the /s4 skill "simple short synthetic style". Just 4 words, easy to remember the formula.

ilitirit 26d ago

I still use GPT 5.5 daily. It doesn't seem to have this problem. It just gives me a concise summary and gets to work.

vipipiccf 26d ago

[flagged]

runtime_lens 26d ago

[dead]

lucaprata 26d ago

[flagged]

rochansinha 26d ago

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)

mcv 26d ago

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.

halilBB 26d ago

[flagged]

codetiger 26d ago

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.

menthe 26d ago

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…

pona-a 26d ago
This was an issue before watermarking was publically announced. I'm also not an expert, but aren't bits of a hash indistinguishible from uniform randomness?
- LoganDark 25d ago
  Depends on the particular hash. Some hashes are designed to produce similar outputs when the input data is similar (for example, SSDeep). I'd imagine hashes designed to survive light copywriting would also not be entirely indistinguishable from random.

dogscatstrees 25d ago

I want to thank the author for this. The difference is night and day. It's not just for adhd, it's just a really practical output in general. To get it to fully work though, it has to be asserted at every turn in the session. That reminder in the skill is negligible in tokens but uses extra nonetheless. I hope the scientists at Anthropic can figure this out, it's not simply an output style flag.

TheLudd 25d ago

I'll try this out. Just find it amusing that a skill file has * A repo with 61 files * 80% python

ankithg 25d ago

[flagged]

kestrelquant 25d ago

[flagged]

black3r 25d ago

> 3. End with one concrete next step. I mean maybe I have ADHD idk i'm not diagnosed, I don't generally have issues understanding Claude's output (even though I do think it's unnecessarily verbose), but I think this one is a general good advice which Claude ignores for some reason, and is especially annoying during debugging sessions, where it asks for 3 outputs, I paste one for it to process while getting the others, and then it immediately forgets it wanted the 2 others, and starts cooking up some wrong conclusions...

poulpy123 25d ago

In the example, I notice that only the original answer explain what is the issue. In this specific case it may be trivial, but I prefer to read something too verbose that explain things than just following instructions blindly (especially if it's for telling twice in a row to open the same file at the same line :D.

one-bank4326 25d ago

[flagged]

saidnooneever 25d ago

i am glad Astra seems yo recognise this type of stuff better and suggest alternatives or even measurements. i got in its instructions since forever that i will get overexcited about ideas and they might need more scrutiny than what i can give them. not sure if it has impact but i felt it was needed :p

SMAAART 25d ago

I don't have ADHD, but I do prefer lists to verbose narratives. I am going to start using this.

stevenhubertron 25d ago

Doesn’t work

3581592986 25d ago

[flagged]

Nevermark 25d ago

I have ADHD, and I approve this task's rules! Side note, because I recently gave my AI the skill of speaking with proper 4th grade grammar, wherever that suffices, to reign in recent redundant, over complex, and indirect speech styles. > 5. A rule fights the task. When a rule would delete the answer itself, the task wins; the shape stays. [...] Unnecessary redundancy, "answer itself" -> "answer". (Pervasive "the X's own" and "the X itself" flourishes kill me.) Unnecessary analogies, indirect reference, "rule fights", "the shape stays". Unnecessarily split up sentences, the whole quote. Unnecessary words, the whole quote. My feedback would have been: >> 5. When a rule interferes with a task, the task wins. [...] (Not critiquing OP. But I just spent half a day correcting sentences exactly like this, to get the 4th Grade Grammar skill working properly and this sentence triggered me! Streams of sentences like that compound in communication complexity and ambiguity.)

holdout-labs 25d ago

[flagged]

oldandboring 25d ago

I am [undiagnosed] high-functioning ASD Level 1, I have high "intelligence" and very strong pattern recognition but slow "processing speed". As a result I am quickly overwhelmed by having too much information presented at once; when presented with lots of "threads" my brain tries to follow them all at once and just melts down. As a result, Claude's default behavior (as a coding agent) is basically engineered to slow me down. Skills like this definitely help, to the extent that the agent respects them as context grows.

ghm2199 25d ago

One thing i am curious about is if anyone who is fluent in a romance language(en/es/fr etc) but their native language was a non-romance one(e.g. japanese or hindi) felt it better using the latter exclusively?

suburban_strike 25d ago

"Explain it like I'm autistic" achieves similar ends.

MetroWind 25d ago

Does it really need that many files?

ayghri 24d ago

- This skill started as a joke after getting frustrated with LLM verbosity, which was causing me "brain fry" - It is good for working on things you already understand and know well and you just wanna get things done. - It is not good for exploration and learning, as you have to read long content to achieve the goal. - Reducing token usage is not a target. - Repository is mostly evals and benchmark code + translations.

danielmai 16d ago

[flagged]