Vibe Coding With ADHD: How I Build Real Things With AI Agents

A while back I wrote a post about "vibe coding" — the idea that one day you'd describe what you want in plain English and AI would handle the code. Back then it was half prediction, half hope.

Well. The site you're reading this on is the receipts.

This shop — the products, the checkout, the music player in the footer, the blog you're on right now — was built by me and AI agents working together. Not a team of developers. One dyslexic, ADHD Welsh bloke and a very patient machine. So this is the follow-up post: what vibe coding actually looks like when it grows up and has to ship real things.

Hyperfocus finally has a partner that keeps up

If you've got ADHD you know the feeling: the idea arrives, the energy spikes, and you have maybe a few golden hours before the dopamine moves on. Traditional coding wasted most of those hours on setup, syntax, and hunting typos.

With AI agents, the golden hours go on the actual idea. I say what I want, the agent drafts it, I steer. My hyperfocus does what it's brilliant at — seeing the whole thing, spotting what's off, pushing to done — and the machine does the part that used to burn me out before I got anywhere.

That's the real unlock. It's not that AI writes code. It's that the boring bits no longer kill the momentum, and momentum is everything for brains like ours.

Start messy on purpose

The ADHD tax on starting is real — task paralysis doesn't care how excited you are. My fix: I'm allowed to start terribly. I open the chat and type something like "I want people to be able to like tracks on my music page" and that's it. No spec, no plan, no proper sentence structure required.

The agent asks the clarifying questions. The plan emerges from the conversation. Starting messy isn't a compromise anymore — it's the method.

Let the machine hold the details

Multi-step anything is where my brain drops things. So I stopped holding the steps in my head. The agent keeps the checklist, remembers where we got to, and picks up exactly there when I come back — whether that's after lunch or after three days of my attention living somewhere else entirely.

No guilt, no "where was I", no half-finished thing quietly dying because re-loading it into my head cost too much. That alone has finished more projects than any productivity system I ever tried.

When the dopamine drops mid-build

It still happens. Halfway through, the shine wears off and the thing becomes Work. Two moves help me here:

First, shrink the next step until it's stupid. Not "finish the checkout" — just "make the button exist". The agent is great at slicing work small when you ask.

Second, ship something visible today. ADHD runs on feedback. Seeing a real change live on the actual site — even a tiny one — refuels in a way a tidy to-do list never will.

What still bites

Honesty corner: AI doesn't fix everything. It will confidently get things wrong, and checking its work takes a kind of attention that ADHD doesn't always want to pay. I've learned to test everything for real before trusting it — click the button, buy the test product, play the track. "It looks done" and "it works" are different countries.

And hyperfocus is still a double-edged sword. The machine never gets tired, which means it will happily follow you into a 2am rabbit hole. The off switch is still your job. I'm still learning that one, if I'm honest.

You don't need permission

Here's the bit I care about most. There are people reading this who've had an idea for years — a shop, a tool, an app — and filed it under "I'm not technical enough."

That filing system is out of date. If you can describe what you want and you can say "no, not like that, like this" — you can build now. The barrier that kept neurodivergent creatives out of software was never intelligence. It was friction, and the friction just left.

Your brain was never the problem. Start messy, start small, start today — and post me what you build. I genuinely want to see it.