Programmers use rubber duck debugging sometimes.
Now that I think about it, I’m going to propose that rubber duck debugging is a way to compensate for ADHD and undiagnosed ADHD is very common among programmers. It’s really just a variant of the “talk through a problem out loud” coping strategy.
Sometimes I’ll ask someone “what?” as in “repeat what you just said” and by the time they start repeating, my brain will have parsed the previous sentence and I want to tell them “nevermind” but I don’t because that’s embarrassing so I have to listen to it again.
Yep! Just as common for me to start responding to the initial comment before they’re even able to start repeating themselves. Just reflexive “what?” from me all day, people hate it (me)
Sometimes I just mentally move on from the topic and start a new discussion right after I asked what which makes many people very confused
ChatGPT (especially GPT-4) is the best for this. You can ask whatever you want without being judged, and it helps you think through the details. You can even ask it to make its answers ADHD-friendly by formatting them as bullet points and using emojis, bold and italics.
Here I asked it to explain the Fediverse in an ADHD-friendly way. The explanation is a bit too simplified for my taste but it covers all important aspects:
-
What’s Fediverse? 🌐 It’s a big, friendly neighborhood of social networks. Think of it as many houses (sites) on the same street.
-
Different sites, but connected: 🔄 Like sending an Instagram message to a Twitter user. Different sites in the Fediverse can chat, post, and share with each other!
-
You’re in Control: 🕹️ You pick your site, you control your data. If you don’t like one, you can switch but still keep your friends.
-
Open Source: 📝 The software is open source. Think of it like a recipe anyone can use or modify. So new cool features can pop up from anywhere!
-
Variety of Platforms: 🎨 There’s Mastodon for tweets, PeerTube for videos, Pixelfed for photos, and more. Choose your own adventure!
Remember: The Fediverse is like a big party 🎉 where everyone’s invited, and you get to pick which room you hang out in!
-
When I start writing a question to ask online, I often solve it myself while formulating the exact question.
Is this exclusive to ADHD people? Otherwise I find this perfectly relatable, happens to me regularly.
I’d say it does very well happen to everyone, but some people might find it much more relatable in general than others. And there would be a correlation between finding it very relatable and a diagnosis on the spectrum, but no hard causality.
Nah. There are plenty of self diagnosed people who post slightly weird but totally normal behaviour to ADHD subs.
being ADHD
*having ADHD