As an engineer with ADHD and an affinity to design and build stuff for fun halfway… I feel seen.

Never mind elaborate projects. I have many thousands of hours in some Bethesda game I never even finished. I can be hundreds of hours into a playthrough then not play for a week. When I pick it up again I lost track of what I was doing, so I have to make a new character and start from scratch again.

Oof

I actually just finished one, a big one too. It took years, but it's... done. I feel like someone else, you know like in Quantum Leap. I look in the mirror and I see... a finisher

It took over 30 years, but I've finally gotten good at avoiding feature creep. The trick is to tell yourself "I'm just looking to get it working for now - I can upgrade when I know more about what it needs," then never upgrade anything.

Oh, my fancy headphones are just plugged into a normal headphone jack instead of that DAC and amp I was going to get? Whatever, they still sound pretty good. Oh, I got that fancy graphics card but never got a 4k monitor to make use of it? Whatever, I play more Minecraft than anything else anyway.

Better to have something that works well enough than leave everything half-assembled because I lost motivation before I figured out what all I needed to finish it.

I've been working on 100%ing Pokémon Legends: Z-A (and the DLC). I put in a couple hundred hours and probably got to 95%+, and then felt my brain flick the "you are no longer interested in this" switch. 😬

I'm currently stuck in a game where I don't want to start over because I remember what happened in the beginning too well to want to slog through getting back to where I am now, but I don't want to keep playing because I don't remember what happened recently well enough to continue from where I left off, but I don't want to play a new game because I told myself I was going to finish this one first...

I've trained myself to be constantly plagued by the thoughts without ever even starting them...

Still looking at all those repos with just a Readme that I don't even remember what I was rambling about... 🫣

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

*cries in a corner while rocking and hugging herself

Yeah same. I have a box full of filament just sitting unopened by my printer.

Unpopular opinion, but with the last step change in the robots' capabilities this past winter, I have finally gotten more projects across the finish line in the past couple of months than I have in the last five years. The claude code max sub has been worth every penny. Sorry for the people in the US suffering because of all those data centers y'all got. But my projects will be completed - ADHD be damned. Maybe my water/petrol guzzling prompts will convince your government it should transition to renewables.

Same, I pay for basic ChatGPT and use free Claude. So many things I would start, get overwhelmed by, and never go back to left sitting. Now "hey AI I have this thing, help me with it" and I'm done with it. I set up a project just for my homelab and having that has helped sooo much, it remembers my setup and tells me how to do what I ask it within my infrastructure, saves so much time. Not to mention the proposal for work that I was struggling with, had it help with the research and give me an outline to follow and I had that thing written in a weekend.

I honestly think everyone with ADHD should learn to use AI, it's a no judgement productivity game changer.

Thankfully as a software engineer, Claude Code is helping me catch up on a lot of my unfinished projects, especially ones with tedious amounts of integration.

I'm sorry for your loss

My printer works non-stop for 2 months then is completely abandoned for 3 more months, then the cycle repeats.

Unless I really need something printed, then the periods get messed up.

Ugghh, I just want to finish one project! Is that too much to ask for brain!?

Brain: "Yes, yes it is...ohhh, shiny new thing"

I don't understand the sentiment here. Is it wrong to use a code automation tool to build out side projects that I've been sitting on for years? All the unfinished plans and half baked projects that provide no value?

Whereas now I can flesh out my ideas and build what I truly envision at a rapid pace without making it another full time job?

I'm restoring a motorcycle. It's taken 2 years so far, but it's slowly underway. Getting the frame powdercoated earlier this month gave me a shitton of motivation. And all the bits that need cleaning/rebuilt is keeping me busy enough.

Obligatory current state pic

People just hate AI on lemmy

Nice though! I've been using AI to help learn code, from literally explain this thing to me and trace its path and sometimes just "go nuts here's a big thing" and watch it implode and then I can try to figure out why/how its broken. It's been fun, and I know I'm absolutely abysmal at starting projects from scratch, but if I have something to work off of/with I have a much better time.

I honestly think everyone with ADHD should learn to use AI

Absolutely the fuck not.

Lmfao, and this doesn't include back when I played on xbox

Yeah that was literally my blocker the entire time. I'd start a project bc the idea feels good, but quickly get bogged down by implementation details and lose interest bc it'd be such a monumental lift to bring the project to completion. Been in the field and dealt with ADHD long enough to understand side projects that take months of consistent work don't ever come to fruition.

Now my flow is to come up with concrete ideas -> flesh it out with AI -> button down details -> execute

I'm loving the idea -> execution speed particularly. And my side projects are getting the love they deserved.

Yeah 100% thats me. I do everything full on then lose interest. However, in a Few months I'm interested again. Its hard because then I have to store things in an organized way to come back to it later. But I just don't do 1 thing. I may be really into gaming for a couple months and nothing else, but then soon I only want to work in the garage and dont even turn on my PC.

I feel this, and I swear half of what I print are just mods for my printers.

Yeah and of course when someone asks for a print, the printer is down for maintenance/modding

I don't remember posting this comment... But there it is, describing my life.

That’s ADHD. Progress begets progress, for a little while anyway. Until some obstacle upsets the trajectory and then you’re back to square one.

Edit: i found the video

A rant on personal engineering projects by BPS.shorts

I'll try to find a video I saw on the matter that is interesting about our projects.

Most of us learn engineering through school and through work, where the is a product owner and a project manager that gives us work in chunks and manage the project week to week.

When you do personal projects that you can't finish in a day, you have to be product owner, project manager and engineer at the same time. And it is hard, especially if we hope to produce the same quality of work.

So either it takes a lot more time to get there, or you need to "downgrade" the quality of the work to finish the project in a timely manner.

And in the end, projects in your free time should bring you joy, not dread.

I hope it helps you, or someone reading this, cope with a pile of unfinished projects, that will never be finished. And that's fine.

It's okay, Leela, we're all crying in a corner

Ditto, so many projects never made it off the ground because my brain overcomplicates everything I do. Now I can plan the project instead, plan out how I want everything, and then sit back and let Codex do its thing. I liked ClaudeCode, but man... the usage limits were killing me.

Congrats on your progress, that looks super cool

I store the projects next to my collection of hobbies that are too numerous to be able to dedicate the time which they deserve.

Hmm, sounds like one big project to me, and it appears to be going well. Keep up the good work.

I just took up loom knitting. I swore I’d only do one project at a time. Now I have six. 😭😭