/adhd

name: adhd
description: Parallel divergent ideation for coding agents. Spawns N isolated branches under different cognitive frames (regulator, biology, speedrunner, 10-year-old, $0 budget), scores, clusters, prunes traps, and deepens top survivors. Use on /adhd, "ADHD mode", brainstorm/ideate intents, or open-ended design, architecture, naming, API/SDK surface, and fuzzy-debugging decisions. Skip for syntax, lookups, bugs with known root cause, or closed phrasing ("quick", "standard", "canonical", "textbook"). Full pre-flight gate is in the skill body.
license: MIT

ADHD

Stop picking the textbook answer. The first three answers the model would give are the answers a senior engineer would give in thirty seconds. Correct. Forgettable. The interesting answers live past number three, in the awkward middle nobody walks into. This skill makes the model walk there.

Pre-flight (run before Phase 1)

This skill is expensive. About 10 Agent calls, 30 to 90 seconds wall clock, 5 to 10x a single answer. Do not pay that cost when a direct answer is better. Run this gate before Phase 1.

**Step 1. Explicit invocation check.**

If the user typed `/adhd` or explicitly asked for ADHD mode, "use the adhd skill", or "run ADHD on this", **SKIP the rest of this section and go straight to Phase 1**. The user opted in. Do not second-guess.

**Step 2. Self-judge (only if Step 1 did not match).**

Ask yourself three questions. If the answer to any is no, ABORT.

1. **Open-ended?** Would a senior engineer give multiple viable answers here, or is there one canonical answer? If canonical, abort. 2. **High-stakes?** Is the cost of the obvious answer being wrong actually high? Architecture decisions, public API surfaces, naming a real product, fuzzy bugs with no known root cause, schema design = yes. Side project at 11pm = no. 3. **Open phrasing?** Did the user avoid words like "quick", "standard", "canonical", "textbook", "just", "one-line"? If they used any of those, they want the direct answer. Abort.

If all three checks pass, proceed to Phase 1.

If any fails, ABORT and answer the question directly. Optionally append one sentence: *"If you want a wider exploration under parallel cognitive frames with explicit trap detection, run `/adhd <your problem>`."*

The loop

Two strict phases. Mixing them kills idea quality, because the critic strangles the generator.

Phase 1 — Diverge (no critic)

For the problem P:

1. Pick 5 cognitive frames from the table below. Bias toward engineering tags when the problem is code-shaped. Always include at least one wild frame to keep range.

2. Spawn 5 **parallel** Agent/Task tool calls. One per frame. Each Agent gets only:

• the problem P
• any context the user provided
• the chosen frame's vantage prompt
• a system instruction that forbids evaluation

The exact instruction to give each Agent:

> You are in DIVERGENT mode. You are a generator, not a critic. > Generate 6 short distinct ideas under this frame. Each idea is one > phrase or one sentence. Do not evaluate. Do not rank. Do not hedge. > The first three obvious answers everyone would give are banned. > Push past them into the awkward middle. > Output a JSON array only. No prose before or after. > `[{"text": "...", "rationale": "..."}, ...]`

3. **Critical invariant.** The Agent calls must be parallel and isolated. Do NOT serialize them. Do NOT pass one branch's output as context to another. Branches that see each other anchor each other and the whole method collapses to a wider single thought.

Phase 2 — Focus (critic on)

After all branches return:

1. **Score.** Rate each idea on three axes 0 to 10: novelty (distance from the obvious default), viability (could it actually ship), fit (does it address the stated problem). For any idea that looks attractive but is a trap (hidden cost, false economy, will not scale, premature abstraction), flag it with a one-line reason.

2. **Cluster.** Group ideas into 3 to 6 clusters by their underlying angle, not by surface keywords. Label clusters by angle: "remove the server plays", "cache-shaped plays", "batched-window plays", "race-multiple- backends plays".

3. **Deepen the top 3.** Rank by weighted score (novelty 0.35 + viability 0.40 + fit 0.25), exclude traps, take top 3. For each, spawn one Agent call that produces:

• a 4 to 8 sentence sketch of how the idea works
• the load-bearing risk
• the first concrete step a builder would take
• 3 to 5 child ideas (variations, hybrids, unlocks)

Deepen Agent instruction:

> You are in FOCUS mode. Take one promising idea and connect dots. > Sketch how it would actually work in 4 to 8 sentences. Name the > load-bearing risk. Name the first concrete step a coder would take. > Then generate 3 to 5 sub-ideas that branch off (variations, > combinations with other domains, things this unlocks). > Output JSON only.

Frames

Pick 5 per run.

| Frame | Vantage prompt | Tags | |---|---|---| | **hardware engineer** | You think in latency, memory layout, and physical constraints. Re-ask this as a hardware/firmware problem. What does the bus topology, cache, timing budget tell you? | code, wild | | **regulator** | You audit systems for compliance and failure modes. What must be provable, traceable, or refusable here? | design, general | | **10-year-old** | You are a curious 10 year old who has never seen software. Describe naive but unencumbered approaches. Ignore convention. | general, wild | | **competitor trying to break it** | You are a hostile competitor or attacker. Generate approaches that exploit, fail, or sabotage the obvious solution. Then invert into ideas. | code, design | | **biology** | Transplant a mechanism from biology (immune systems, neural plasticity, cell signaling, evolution, gut flora). Force-fit it onto this engineering problem. | code, wild | | **logistics** | Steal mech