ADHD Diary #002: No-Travel-Day — 155 Commits in 8 Days
155 commits. 8 days. 8 projects. 74 new features. 62 bug fixes.
Those are the raw numbers from a week that was nothing special. No sprint, no hackathon, no deadline pressure. Just an ADHD brain that opens the laptop at ten in the evening and realizes at two in the morning that it forgot about time.
155 commits sounds like a team. It was one person. In the evenings. After dinner.
The Week in Numbers
Most productive day: 42 commits in a single Wednesday. Quietest: 6 commits on Sunday — but that was also Easter, goulash, and strawberry cake.
The distribution across the week says more about ADHD than any diagnosis:
- Wednesday: 42 commits — the hyperfocus day
- Monday: 26 commits
- Tuesday: 24 commits
- Friday: 15 commits
- Saturday: 15 commits
- Sunday (Easter): 15 commits
- Thursday: 12 commits — energy trough
- Monday (today): 6 commits — the evening is still young
This isn’t a linear work process. This is wave-riding. Some days the wave carries you. Some days you just paddle.
What Got Built in a Week
A complete AI infrastructure — from zero to production in three days. A central LLM gateway serving all my projects. 58 prompt templates, 40 routing rules, a learning system that improves itself every 30 minutes. Four different models, automatically routed by task and complexity. Live on day four.
An intelligence platform for optical transceivers — from v0.2.0 to v0.2.6 in one week. 109 commits in this project alone. A blog engine with 18 pipeline stages. A scraper network collecting prices from 60+ competitors around the clock. A verification system that distinguishes real data from invented data. A procurement intelligence engine. Forecast charts. A switch-to-transceiver finder.
A network intelligence tool — from v0.6.2 to v0.6.9. Resilience scores, route leak detection, a local BGP RIB cache, an MCP server for external integrations. 19 commits, each one a feature or a fix.
ShieldX — my open-source tool for detecting and defending against prompt injection attacks on LLMs. ShieldX didn’t get a direct repo update this week, but something more important: it was fully integrated into the new AI infrastructure. Dedicated routing rules, dedicated prompt templates for false-positive analysis, and a new security daemon — a self-healing security monitor — grew directly out of the ShieldX context. That’s how ADHD projects grow: not always through direct commits, sometimes through cross-pollination.
Security hardening across all projects — AES-256-GCM encryption for all stored credentials across four different projects, a self-healing daemon, a security daemon. All in a single evening session.
And this ADHD diary — started spontaneously yesterday evening.
The Pattern: Why ADHD and Coding Work Together
People often ask: “how do you get all that done?” The honest answer: not linearly. Chaotically.
On the Wednesday with 42 commits, I switched between three projects at least ten times. The scraper shows zero results — quick fix — oh there’s also a UI bug — and suddenly I’m building a completely new feature I hadn’t planned that morning.
Neurotypical developers would call that inefficient. For my brain it’s the opposite. The constant switching keeps the dopamine level up. Every small fix, every green test result, every successful deploy — these are micro-rewards the ADHD brain needs to keep going.
The trick isn’t discipline. The trick is channeling the chaos energy into structure. Git commits are my structure.
The 18-Stage Blog Engine
One example of how ADHD projects escalate: I wanted to build a simple blog generator. One prompt in, one article out. Simple.
Three days later I had 18 stages:
Topic → Angle → Outline → Draft → Reality Check → Depth → Opinion → Kill AI Voice → Reduction → AEM → Style Lock → QA → Quality Score → Auto-Precision → Viral Signal → LinkedIn Post
Each stage exists because the previous one wasn’t good enough. “Kill AI Voice” exists because the drafts sounded too polished. “Reduction Engine” exists because the articles were too long. “Viral Signal” exists because at 1 AM I thought: LinkedIn posts could be automated too.
That’s ADHD in pure form: you start with an idea and end up with a system.
The Cost
But there’s a cost. The nights are long. Sleep is short. And the next morning, when the little one wakes up and dad looks tired again — you wonder if this is the right way.
The fixed blockers in the calendar help. Mornings for family, work during the day, evenings for family. And only when everyone is asleep: the seven terminal windows.
It’s a balancing act. Every single day.
Day 2 — Status
It’s Sunday evening. The girls are asleep. Seven terminal windows are open.
155 commits this week. No idea how many it’ll be next week. Probably just as many — or zero, if the head doesn’t cooperate. That’s part of it too.
The good thing about this diary: it documents both. The 42-commit days and the days when you just stare at the screen.
Day 2 — done.