Unlurker

ADHD and monotropism (2023) (monotropism.org)

There are two levels to this. The Standard Environmental Fixes This is about finding the right level of stimulation vs. distraction. Many people with ADHD work better with external stimulation, like music. Small habits help, too—like taking photos of tasks to remember them. (e.g., snap a photo of the empty printer paper so you remember to order more when you scroll through your camera roll later). The Job Fit (The more interesting intervention). Sometimes we need to figure out if the problem is the job, not the person. Some people with ADHD simply cannot tolerate meaningless or monotonous tasks. An active person, for example, probably shouldn't work as a data entry clerk. for instance a 50-year-old builder who becomes a manager because his body is too beat up for hard labor. He is suited for leadership but can't stand the administrative work. Even if he wants the job, the boredom of the paperwork makes him miserable. These are the people who often present as depressed and benefit most from medication, as it gives them the stability to tolerate boring but necessary tasks. So basically spanning everything from small techniques, to existential and professional evaluation of best fit, to medication. Everyone is different.

Thank you for this post. It’s so obvious in hindsight, but I’ve been struggling for the last couple of years with my day job, especially the last while since I’ve been unmedicated. In office, I listened to music almost my entire career, it’s the only way I got anything done for whatever reason, to the point I almost got fired once when a manager tried to stop me heading out briefly to pick up a replacement set of headphones when mine broke. I threw a literal tantrum almost, all I knew is I had no music, and that it was essential I did so I could continue doing what I was doing. For some reason however, when I made a transition in the last few years to WFH, I’ve been living this bizzarely very different approach where I sit in almost complete silence all day long, and it’s the most I’ve ever struggled with my…focus for lack of a better word. I now truly wonder how much this may have to do with this huge struggle I’ve felt to remain engaged or on task. I’m getting my job done, but 90% of my effort is me having to force myself to get it done rather than…just getting it done like I used too. I suddenly feel very stupid.

You have no idea how normal your situation is. At worst, you are as stupid as the rest of us. At least you’re actually able to understand yourself and actually try to tackle your issues. Don’t feel stupid. Most people doesn’t even bother self reflect.

I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid (before it was ADHD). People always describe the disorder as "lack of focus" but that's a really poor description for what I have. I would say I have "hyper focus", to the point where if I'm working on something interesting, I will lose track of time and am unable to redirect my attention to anything else. This makes me incredibly "spacey" as often my mind is still fixated on the task even long after I've stopped working on it. It also makes it very hard for me to accomplish any task I don't think are interesting... And often a new idea will strike me like an epiphany that immediately takes the top spot of my attention. The result is I have hundreds of half finished projects in flight across countless areas of interest.

There are different types and combinations of ADD/ADHD/Autism/Parkinson’s/etc. The closest to reality anyone tried to describe are Dr. Amen’s ADHD “types” and regions of the brain related to attention-deficit symptoms. But it’s much more complex. E.g. when you don’t process Folic Acid due to MTHFR mutations, chemicals can be generated that cause other genetic mutations in the brain over time, causing psychosis. And some stimulants with likely undiagnosed predisposition of paranoia can cause schizophrenic-like symptoms for years. If you just take what a psychiatrist or even the supplements that Dr. Amen would suggest, it may be a miracle for some people, but for others that miracle may turn into a nightmare. I didn’t recognize that I was having hallucinations and paranoia until years later. I’ve found a set of things that I eat and natural supplements that work for me, and it took years of struggle. I miss the meds, but they didn’t make me better, they almost ruined my life.

I think it's the opposite. 4000 years ago we would fail to prepare and not survive the winter. Nowadays we get by by occasionally solving a problem that nobody asked to have solved but golly the solution is kinda neat.

If we died off we wouldn't be here.

Eh, newtons theory of universal gravitation is still a theory, even if he had no access to particle physics, and even if later the Theory of General Relativity (among others) largely supplanted it. It’s also still useful (and used!) in most real life engineering situations. It’s rare where time dilation applies in say civil engineering. That folks with Autism and ADHD may have large portions of their symptoms occur because they focus too much on some specific things, to the detriment of others - like emotional well being/regulation - can still be falsifiable (better than most psychiatric theories for sure!) and useful clinically. Personally, it lines up with what I’ve seen and experienced. That there is another (perhaps chemical, or brain structure) theory too doesn’t necessarily change that!

They're Newton's laws of universal gravitation, not a theory. The difference matters because Newton's laws describe what happens in nature without positing a mechanism. Einstein provided the mechanism via general relativity, which is a theory.

Agent design is still hard (lucumr.pocoo.org)

Great post. Re: frameworks, I tried a number of them and then found Pocketflow and haven’t found a reason to try anything else since. It’s now been ported to half a dozen or more languages (including my port to Ruby). The simple api and mental model makes it easy for everyone on my team to jump into, extend, and compose. Highly recommend for anyone frustrated with the larger SDKs.

Design is hard because models change almost on a weekly basis. Quality abruptly falls off or drastically changes without announcements. It’s like building a house without proper foundation. I don’t know how many tokens I wasted because of this. I want to say 30% of the cost and resources this year for me.

This is why I use the agent I use. I won't name the company, because I don't want people to think I'm a shill for them (I've already been accused of it before, but I'm just a happy, excited customer). But it's an agentic coding company that isn't associated with any of the big model providers. I don't want to keep up with all the new model releases. I don't want to read every model card. I don't want to feel pressured to update immediately (if it's better). I don't want to run evals. I don't want to think about when different models are better for different scenarios. I don't want to build obvious/common subagents. I don't want to manage N > 1 billing entities. I just want to work. Paying an agentic coding company to do this makes perfect sense for me.

Amen. Been seeing these agent SDKs coming out left and right for a couple of years and thought it'd be a breeze to build an agent. Now I'm trying to build one for ~3 weeks, and I've tried three different SDKs and a couple of architectures. Here's what I found: - Claude Code SDK (now called Agent SDK) is amazing, but I think they are still in the process of decoupling it from the Claude Code, and that's why a few things are weird. e.g, You can define a subagent programmatically, but not skills. Skills have to be placed in the filesystem and then referenced in the plugin. Also, only Anthoripic models are supported :( - OpenAI's SDK's tight coupling with their platform is a plus point. i.e, you get agents and tool-use traces by default in your dashboard. Which you can later use for evaluation, distillation, or fine-tuning. But: 2. They have agent handoffs (which works in some cases), but not subagents. You can use tools as subagents, though. 1. Not easy to use a third-party model provider. Their docs provide sample codes, but it's not as easy as that. - Google Agent Kit doesn't provide any Typescript SDK yet. So didn't try. - Mastra, even though it looks pretty sweet, spins up a server for your agent, which you can then use via REST API. umm.. why? - SmythOS SDK is the one I'm currently testing because it provides flexibility in terms of choosing the model provider and defining your own architecture (handoffs or subagents, etc.). It has its quirks, but I think it'll work for now. Question: If you don't mind sharing, what is your current architecture? Agent -> SubAgents -> SubSubAgents? Linear? or a Planner-Executor? I'll write a detailed post about my learnings from architectures (fingers crossed) soon.

Hello, about Claude Code where only Anthoripic models are supported, in reality you can use Claude Code router ( https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router ) to use other models in Claude Code. I use it since some weeks with opensource models and it works pretty well. You can even use "free" models from openrouter

The frameworks are all pointless, just use AI assist to create agents in python or ideally a language with concurrency. You will be happy you did

How do you deal with the different APIs/Tooluse schema in a custom build? As other people have mentioned, it's a bigger undertaking than it sounds.

Going to hijack this to ask a question that’s been on my mind: does anybody know why there’s no agentic tools that use tree-sitter to navigate code? It seems like it would be much more powerful than having the LLM grepping for strings or rewriting entire files to change one line.

> does anybody know why there’s no agentic tools that use tree-sitter to navigate code? I would guess the biggest reason is that there is no RL happening on the base models with tree-sitter as tool. But there is a lot of RL with bash and so it knows how to grep. I did experiment with giving tree sitter and ast-grep to agents and my experience the results are mixed.

Thanks, I was also wondering why they don't use RAG.

I forgot to mention that Aider uses a tree sitter approach. It's blazing fast and great for quick changes. It's not the greatest agent for doing heavy edits but I don't it has to do with them not using grep.

> These are not going to be problems tomorrow because the technology will shift. As it happened many time in the span of the last 2 years. What technology shifts have happened for LLMs in the last 2 years?

If we expand this to 3 years, the single biggest shift that totally changed LLM development is the increase in size of context windows from 4,000 to 16,000 to 128,000 to 256,000. When we were at 4,000 and 16,000 context windows, a lot of effort was spent on nailing down text splitting, chunking, and reduction. For all intents and purposes, the size of current context windows obviates all of that work. What else changed? - Multimodal LLMs - Text extraction from PDFs was a major issue for rag/document intelligence. A lot of time was wasted trying to fine tune tesseract. Now, LLM's can extract the text from the images very capably. - Reduced emphasis on vector search and RAG. People found that for most purposes, having an agent grep your documents is cheaper and better than using a more complex rag pipeline.

We started putting them in image and video models and now image and video models are insane. I think the next period of high and rapid growth will be in media (image, video, sound, 3D), not text. It's much harder to adapt LLMs to solving business use cases with text. Each problem is niche, you have to custom tailor the solution, and the tooling is crude. The media use cases, by contrast, are low hanging fruit and result in 10,000x speedups and cost reductions almost immediately. The models are pure magic. I think more companies would be wise to ignore text for now and focus on visual domain problems. Nano Banana has so much more utility than agents. And there are so many low hanging fruit ways to make lots of money. Don't sleep on image and video. That's where the growth salient is.

> Nano Banana has so much more utility than agents. I am so far removed from multimedia spaces that I truly can't imagine a universe where this could be true. Agents have done incredible things for me and Nano Banana has been a cool gimmick for making memes. Anyone have a use case for media models that'll expand my mind here?

You can pretty much completely reprogram agents just by passing them through a smart proxy. You don't need to rewrite claude/codex, just add context engineering and tool behaviors at the proxy layer.

yep, that's exactly where we've landed. focus on the tools and context, let claude handle the execution.

I agree with your analysis of building your own Agent framework to have some level of control and fewer abstractions. Agents at their core are about programmatically talking to an LLM and performing these basic operations: 1. Structured Input and String Interpolation in prompts 2. Structured Output and Unmarshalling String response to Structured output (This is getting easier now with LLMs supporting Structured output) 3. Tool registry/discovery (of MCP and Function tools), Tool calls and response looping 4. Composability of Tools 5. Some form of Agent to Agent delegation I’ve had good luck with using PydanticAI which does these core operations well (due to the underlying Pydantic library), but still struggles with too many MCP servers/Tools and composability. I’ve built an open-source Agent framework called OpusAgents, that makes the process of creating Agents, Subagents, Tools that are simpler than MCP servers without overloading the context. Check it out here and tutorials/demos to see how it’s more reliable than generic Agents with MCP servers in Cursor/ClaudeDesktop - https://github.com/sathish316/opus_agents It’s built on top of PydanticAI and FastMCP, so that all non-core operations of Agents are accessible when I need them later.

This sounds interesting. What about the agent behavior itself? How it decides how to come at a problem, what to show the user along the way, and how it decides when to stop? Are these things you have attempted to grapple with in your framework?

Jack Ma's family shifted wealth to UK after years-long 'disappearance' (source-material.org)

Your point being?

That your offhand remark is meaningless.

In a dictatorship this happens indeed. And there's nothing you can do about it. In the US people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc. It is unfortunate that someone is trying to become dictator, but the point of this country is that it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that.

> people fight back. There are courts, NGOs, law firms, journalists, people can protest, can petition their representatives, etc, etc. It's actually pretty normal for modern dictatorships to have all that too. During eras where common people and peer nations appreciate democracy and liberalism, the typical way of operating a dictatorship is to allow for nominal expression of all those things but to structure in limits on its efficacy. They happen, they're just made sure never exceed the regime's capacity to rein them in, and sometimes are even instigated by the regime as an alternative means of influence. > it doesn't become a dictatorship just because one person wants that Sure. And it also doesn't only become a dictatorship when those things are no longer visible. If you only see dictatorship as some abstract platonic ideal of complete repression of dissent, instead of as a concentration of power effectively beyond the reach of the demos and its guardian institutions, you'll miss most of its occurrences in the real world.

Land not depreciating is true, because unlike capital, it doesn't suffer entropy for all intent and purpose. Compare that to a car, which is forever basically a depreciating asset. Also, Netherland did not create land, because ocean is a type of land. They merely improve the land to the point that it can be used by people walking around, but that also preclude the ocean to be used by other means such as aquaculture and building coral reefs which can be used to provide ecosystem services and sustenance to humans.

> They merely improve the land They terraformed it :)

Roblox CEO Makes a Fool of Himself in Car-Crash Interview (kotaku.com)

I beg your pardon! SimCity incipiently indoctrinates children to believe in crazy stuff like the 9-9-9 tax plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan

It can also indoctrinate them to becoming mass murderers by spawning huge zombie outbreaks.

> When asked about the “scope of the problem” of predators in the application, Baszucki came in shoulders first saying, “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” I mean… how much benefit of the doubt is one expected to give someone who runs a game for kids who sees paedophiles as an ‘opportunity’? Like, this isn’t a criminal trial, it’s a news article. There is no presumption on innocence, and the company’s past is relevant.

“Roblox CEO sees pedophiles as ‘opportunity’” would be a less biased headline that reports the actual interesting facts of the interview and would be more damaging to them in practice.

It must be tiring though to keep the "neutral" approach for every article. How many benefits of doubts is Roblox owed, really? Asking for a more neutral tone is almost akin to asking for Hunter S Thompson to rewrite "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" in a more neutral tone.

If a journalist does not at least attempt to present their viewpoint as neutral I will immediate presume they have irrational bias and grow skeptical of what the journalist is telling me - no matter what side of the issue their bias is on. In other words, if you talk to me like a salesman I will presume you are trying to sell me and I wont want to buy. Talk to me like an adult. Tell me what happened. That doesn't mean sugarcoating it. When I read the quotes and combine that with my existing knowledge of Roblox I can come to my own conclusions just fine.