AI gave my ADHD superpowers!
A snippet into me and my brain.
Last night, after dinner I was chatting with claude and gemini asking them both the same (I mean why not? as if there isn't enough information to consume -_-) question about stochastic multi-modal planning questions. I asked them about existing textbooks to learn the basics.
At this point, my Brain reached out to me.
My Brain
online
Yo, remember you took that course in grad school, the one you barely understood and ended up auditing it instead?
Stochastic control course buddy.
Oh yeah, I even bought a textbook for it....
And you never opened it.
Nevermind that, ... I still have that book I think!
I jump off the chair, go look for the book in the small bookshelf, I don't find it, I go look for it in the big nice yellow box from Costco, which has my books from grad school. Yay, I find the book but I also find a bunch of other books.
I bring them to the shelf and start putting them in the shelf, at this point my brain from a different thread reached out to me.
My Brain thread 2
online
You should organize this shelf sometime...
I know, its so chaotic here. I think I gave a couple of books to friends a while ago.
You should have a catalogue of your books.
I quickly snap a picture of my bookshelf. Next minute, I'm at my desk on my laptop.
Claude
online
Hey Claude, can you build me a website for my books? Here is a picture of my bookshelf.
Image size is too large.
What was the ffmpeg command to resize image again?
ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf -q:v 10 output.jpg
Okay, build me a website for my books. (with the reduced img attached)
React + Vite? Python backend? (and asks a bunch of questions)
After that point, Claude went to town, I conversed a bit more, instructed to save the setting to server-side and a few other preferences, that weren't in the website. Then eventually to create a docker file to deploy on my small local server.
Not only did Claude build the website! Claude also auto-populated the website with books from the Image I provided....
Overall, since the thought popped up, within an hour I had a working online book catalogue, deployed on my local server. I mean what was I doing before that, who knows, it's not just the thought but the fact that I can realize the thought makes it difficult for my attention span. Earlier I would have maybe made a mental note, and add it to one of my many-many todo lists and move on. But now I can finish building the website in less time than I would have taken to find the right todo list, and now, I do not have to add it to the todo list. This is what I mean by "Superpowers".
I have been vibe coding on and off for the last 3 years, back then it was "help me build" and now its "build me". I mean I remember trying to build a simple website for something and spending days to no end, well because, I don't know anything about web development. In the last two months I built about 4 web-apps for personal use. So, the question my wife asked,
Is everyone going to build their own websites/app now?
If that's the case, that seems like a lot of wasted resources huh? But then why build my own website/app? Customization? Privacy? Or is it just the ADHD brain wanting to build something new? Who knows, but I'm here for it.
P.S.: I don't think I have ADHD, but I do have a lot of ADHD like symptoms, who knows what the doom scrolling did to my brain.
P.P.S.: I wonder if the stochastic control book is still lying on the floor near the bookshelf.