Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

From my own personal experience, it would explain why when I use window managers like i3wm and Yabai versus regular desktop that I am more effective and efficient. Somehow window managers just fits perfectly like glove for my brain.

I don't get that cognitive load overhead when I have million different tabs and windows and programs and notes just splattered in a single screen. It's all neatly hidden away until I need them with good management of window managers.

I find it asto ishing that research now is directed at how to figure out what works best for persons with ADHD. This will lead to many breakthroughs.

"After that, participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)" ... this is a surprising take. Debugging, as the saying goes, is often like a murder mystery. Edit: I dont' think the authors are wrong about that, since they have observed the participants, I assume they chose a monotonous debugging task.

Finally some research on ADHD and UI. I have it and have always found GUIs confusing as hell.

Most people seem to find Windows an intuitive OS, for instance. Not me. Windows up to and including XP felt pretty intuitive, but since then every version has gotten more confusing. I never know where to find stuff, how to navigate around. I'm sure there are visual cues that I'm just not capable of processing. Icons for buttons mean nothing to me. Text does. So the design of HN for instance is wonderfully easy to understand because almost everything clickable is just plain text.

Something like Microsoft Word is completely mind-boggling to me. Both before and after "ribbons".

I would love some sort of global setting for GUI frameworks to replace all icons with their alt text or something.

This reminds me of how Rob Pike mentioned his dislike for syntax coloring as extra cognitive load, which seems odd in regards to current IDEs filled with information and stimuli.

With LLMs now directly interfaced to IDEs, it is likely that any obstacle will trigger a need for immediate AI powered dopamine reward. I wonder how programmers brains are going to rewire in this regard, even for those not subject to ADHD, but I suspect their sense of focus will worsen even more.

In the coming years, I wouldn't be surprised if writing high level code will slowly turn from mainstream to an edge art requiring focus and commitment, like assembly programming has already become. The casual developer will probably be just giving directives to an AI code bot and be incredulous when told how people used to write code themselves, pondering for hours on a bug in a bare boring terminal. A possibility is that what is perceived ADHD today might become the norm with future humans.