I saw a TikTok today from a guy who’d read an article arguing that your website should be more than a portfolio of your work. It should also be a place where people can get to know you.

That landed. If you’ve read this blog, you’ve seen a lot of what I build with AI: the RSS reader, the email archive, the infrastructure audits, the whole list on my AI page. What I haven’t really written down is why. Why does this matter so much to me, enough that I keep showing up to defend it in rooms full of people who’d rather I didn’t?

The short answer: I have ADHD, and AI is the first tool I’ve ever used that works the way my brain does.

How my brain actually works

I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. Ideas are the easy part. They show up in the shower, in the car, in the middle of a client call about something else entirely. Most of them feel like good ideas!

The hard part is everything after that. Turning an idea into a finished thing means a long, boring middle: the setup, the details, the fourteenth small decision, the bug that eats an afternoon. That middle is where my attention goes to die. By the time I get through it, my brain has already wandered off to the next shiny idea, and the first one sits half-built forever.

For most of my life, that pattern looked like a character flaw. Unfinished projects, abandoned tools, a graveyard of good intentions. Most productivity advice treats it as a discipline problem: try harder, focus more, stop switching.

I tried that for years. It doesn’t work, because it isn’t a discipline problem. It’s how I’m wired.

Getting ideas out before they vanish

The first thing AI changed was speed. When an idea hits, I can talk it through right then, messy and half-formed, and get something real back in minutes. A plan. A draft. A working first version. (Or even a “no, this won’t work”!)

That matters more than it sounds. With ADHD, an idea has a short shelf life. If I can’t capture it while it’s hot, it’s gone, or it turns into one more thing nagging at the back of my head. Being able to dump it out to a partner who can actually do something with it means I’m not carrying it around anymore.

This post started the same way. I watched a video, had a feeling, and started talking.

Finishing the things I start

The bigger change is what happens to that boring middle.

I built Drift, the productivity app I use every day, from an empty folder in a single sitting. Before AI, that project would have stalled out somewhere around configuring the database. I could have learned it. I’d just have lost the thread long before I got there.

Now I stay in the part my brain is good at: deciding what it should do, noticing what’s off, making the calls. Claude handles a lot of the tedious middle. I get to the end while I still care about it.

That’s the part I didn’t have the patience for before. I wasn’t incapable. The gap between idea and finished was just longer than my attention span, and AI shortened it.

Switching gears stopped being a problem

I bounce between projects constantly. It used to mean nothing got finished. Now I can work on a Cloudflare Worker, a WordPress plugin and a client’s email setup in the same afternoon and actually close all three out. That works because I’m not the one holding every detail in my head. The context lives in the conversation and in my notes, not in my working memory.

What used to be my biggest weakness turned into something close to a superpower.

“Isn’t that a crutch?”

Yes. That’s the point.

People say “crutch” like it’s an insult. But a crutch is what lets someone with an injured leg get where they’re going. Nobody tells them to just walk harder.

I think of it more as scaffolding, honestly. It holds the structure up while the building goes up. My judgment, my taste and my decisions are still the building. AI is what keeps it standing long enough for me to finish it.

I’m not handing my brain over, either. I still decide what’s worth building. I still catch it when it’s wrong, and it’s wrong plenty; I’ve written about that too. The partnership works because I bring the ideas and the judgment and it brings the patience I don’t have.

Why I keep talking about this

I get a lot of skepticism about AI from people I care about, mostly fellow progressives. Some of it is fair. I share plenty of the worries.

But when people write off AI entirely, they’re also writing off something that works as an accommodation for a lot of brains like mine. For me it’s the difference between a life full of half-finished things and a life where I actually ship. That’s not a small thing to give up on principle.

I don’t expect everyone to use it the way I do. I just want people to know that for some of us, this isn’t a gimmick or a shortcut. It’s the thing that finally let our brains do what they were always trying to do.

Mine needed a partner. I’m glad I found one.