ADHD — a skill for agents

An architectural fix for premature convergence in autoregressive reasoning.

Linear Chain-of-Thought anchors on whatever it says first. Tree-of-Thought widens the search but still walks a single shared context, so the anchoring persists across branches. ADHD treats this as an architectural problem, not a prompting one — it spawns N isolated reasoning processes under deliberately distorted cognitive frames, with zero shared context during divergence, then runs a separate critic pass to score, cluster, prune traps, and deepen the survivors.

Reach for it on design decisions, fuzzy debugging, naming, API surface design, strategy, and any prompt of the shape "give me a few ways to…".

📄 Preprint: ADHD: Parallel Divergent Ideation for Coding Agents · 👤 Author: Udit Akhouri — @akhouriudit · LinkedIn

Featured

• 🔌 Adopted by repowire — the first OSS project to officially ship ADHD. Its maintainer ported the framework onto repowire's mesh-orchestrator primitives in PR #313 (merged): frames become frame-shifted temp peers, the generator/critic split maps onto separate peers vs. the orchestrator's own turn, attribution via metadata.based-on (MIT).
• 📰 The New Stack ran a feature story on ADHD for Claude Code.
• 💬 OpenClaw / multi-agent community is independently testing it across agents. One tester: "I read it, installed it on two different agents… I actually love it. This is great. I thought this was gonna be another useless post. But no, it wasn't."
• 🔬 An independent evidence-based research review (11 sources, 8 validation rounds) was published against the method — findings tracked openly as issues #16–#18.

Community

👉 Join the ADHD community → as a contributor, maintainer, early adopter, or just a member. One short form. We coordinate frame contributions, eval problems, integrations, and adopter onboarding there.

Early adopters

Projects that officially ship or integrate ADHD:

| Project | What they did | Status | |---|---|---| | repowire | Ported ADHD onto repowire's mesh-orchestrator primitives — frames become frame-shifted temp peers, generator/critic split maps to separate peers vs. the orchestrator's turn. Ships in the default orchestrator template. (PR #313) | ✅ Merged · MIT attribution |

Shipping ADHD in your project? Open a PR adding it here, or open an issue and we'll add you.

Install

One command, auto-detects your agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity, Codex, Cline, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, and ~50 more):

npx skills add UditAkhourii/adhd

Then invoke explicitly with /adhd "your problem", or let it auto-trigger on ideation intents.

Codex quick path

If the universal command above fails to register inside Codex (some Codex builds discover skills from a specific path), force the target:

npx skills add UditAkhourii/adhd -a codex -g

Or install manually into Codex's skills directory:

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills/adhd
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/UditAkhourii/adhd/main/skills/adhd/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.codex/skills/adhd/SKILL.md

Restart Codex. /adhd "design a rate limiter" should now route through the skill. The skill ships with a single-line description (≤600 chars) specifically because some Codex builds truncate or reject multi-line YAML block descriptions.

CLI and library installs, manual curl for other agents, and per-platform paths are in documentation/install.md.

npm install -g adhd-agent     # CLI
npm install adhd-agent        # library

Quickstart

adhd "design a rate limiter that survives a leader election"
adhd "name this function" --frames 3 --ideas 8 --top 2

import { run, renderText } from "adhd-agent";

const result = await run({ problem: "How should we shard this queue under bursty load?", framesPerRun: 5, topK: 3 });
console.log(renderText(result));
// result.shortlist · result.nonObviousPick · result.traps · result.deepened · result.clusters

Full reference: documentation/api.md.

How it works

A two-phase loop with a hard wall between the phases.

1. Diverge. Pick N cognitive frames. Spawn N parallel, isolated Agent calls — each sees the problem plus one frame's vantage prompt, and a system prompt that forbids evaluation. Branches never see each other, so no anchoring.
2. Focus. A separate critic call scores every idea (novelty / viability / fit), flags traps with reasons, clusters by underlying angle, and deepens the top-K survivors into sketches with risks and first steps.

The generator-critic split is mechanical — separate LLM calls with opposite system prompts — not promised in one prompt. Deep dive: documentation/how-it-works.md. How it differs from CoT and ToT: documentation/vs-cot-and-tot.md.

Results

Mean scores across 6 open-ended engineering problems (0–10), ADHD vs a single-shot baseline at the same model, judged by an independent LLM with a skeptical-staff-engineer prompt, A/B order randomized.

| Dimension | ADHD | Baseline | Δ | Ratio | | ------------------ | -------: | -------: | --------: | ----: | | breadth | 9.00 | 4.83 | +4.17 | 1.9× | | novelty | 7.83 | 2.67 | +5.17 | 2.9× | | trap detection | 9.50 | 1.83 | +7.67 | 5.2× | | actionability | 9.50 | 6.50 | +3.00 | 1.5× | | builder usefulness | 7.67 | 6.83 | +0.83 | 1.1× |

ADHD wins 5 of 6 problems. Biggest gap is trap detection — baselines rarely name the seductive-but-broken ideas. Methodology, limitations, and how to reproduce: documentation/evals.md.

Documentation

| Page | What's in it | |---|---| | Install | Every install path — skill, CLI, library, Agent SDK, per-platform | | How it works | The two-phase loop + architecture (context, pruning, orchestration) | | vs CoT & ToT | Structural comparison, the three load-bearing differences, frames vs personas | | Frames | The 15 cognitive frames, how selection works, how to author your own | | When to use | Use / don't use, why it shines on creative work, cost & speed | | CLI & API | CLI flags, library types, using ADHD inside your own agent | | Evals | Methodology, headline numbers, limitations, roadmap |

Also: SKILL.md (the runnable skill) · SOURCE-SPEC.md (original spec) · CONTRIBUTING.md · the preprint.

Star History

External reviews

• Han plugin compatibility analysis by @mxriverlynn — evidence-based review using Han's own /research skill, 11 sources, 8 validation rounds. Findings tracked as issues #16, #17, #18.

License

MIT License.

ADHD operationalizes the Divergent Ideation source spec (SOURCE-SPEC.md). The runnable skill is at skills/adhd/SKILL.md.

Contact

Udit Akhouri — author of the preprint and maintainer.

adhdstack.github.io · @akhouriudit · LinkedIn · [email protected] · @UditAkhourii

Open to collaboration with research labs and applied-AI teams working on reasoning, planning, and agentic systems.