Simply adding "Keep answers short, I have ADHD" should work same as this skill.
Does it? I've tried so many versions of this in custom instructions.
I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
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Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#82Until either of these cases happen:
A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models
B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output
We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#83Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…
You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#84Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single…
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Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#85good skill. but why should all this repo e needed for a small MD file??
If its on github, you can add it directly to your claude via the claude marketplace and manage updates within claude (or set it to auto-update)
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#86I found 2 things helping a lot: 1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure. 2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.
Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#87You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#88Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#89> Install
> Copy/paste into your CLI prompt:
> Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd, refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions.
This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter"
I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named github repo because the LLM text watermarking needed to swap out a token for an alternative "just as correct" token that matches the statistical pattern.
Am I being paranoid?
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#90I used it for a few months, and can say that no skill is up to the task of keeping Claudeuage in check. You'll get a lot more mileage out of an "output style" with the same instructions, because output styles regularly remind Claude how to speak.
Even output styles are not always up to the task (Claudeuage slips through), and they're mutually exclusive, so you can only have one active at a time.