Too Many AI Dev Tools, Not Enough Dopamine: The ADHD Founder’s Guide to Accidental Startup Sabotage
By Someone Who Opened 17 Tabs While Writing This Title
Let me set the scene.
You’re a software engineer. You're a founder. You have ADHD. You wake up at 3:47 a.m. with an urgent need to build an AI-powered SaaS that replaces your calendar, your life coach, and maybe your mom. You crack your knuckles, open your MacBook, and before the coffee even hits, you've opened:
- Cursor (because VS Code is so last week),
- Windsurf (to orchestrate internal agents you haven't even hired yet),
- Replit (for “quick” cloud coding that somehow becomes your main IDE),
- Claude (for “research” that turns into an existential therapy session),
- And an obscure LLM playground you found at 2 a.m. on Hacker News.
Welcome to the ADHD Founder’s Dev Stack: 99% dopamine, 1% deliverables.
Chapter 1: Cursor, My Beloved (and Betrayer)
You open Cursor. The AI pair programmer greets you like a golden retriever with a PhD in React. You’re just here to refactor a function, but next thing you know, you’re in a heated debate with GPT-4 about tailwind naming conventions and you’ve accidentally scaffolded an e-commerce site for shoes… shaped like other shoes.
You hit ⌘+K to switch files and somehow you’ve spawned a new AI assistant who just pitched you on pivoting your startup to become a cursor plugin for AI therapists.
You say yes. You always say yes.
Chapter 2: Windsurf, or: How I Learned to Love Internal Chaos
Windsurf promises the dream: spin up internal AI agents to manage ops, marketing, HR, therapy, taxes, passive-aggressive emails - you name it. But you, ADHD founder, give each agent a little too much autonomy.
Soon, “ComplianceBot” has unionized.
“GrowthBot” just rage-quit after arguing with “InfraBot” about Redis versus SQLite.
You're technically still the CEO, but your Slack channel now resembles the plot of Westworld Season 3, if all the hosts had Jira tickets.
Chapter 3: Replit, the Candy Store You Live In
You log into Replit “just to try an idea real quick.” That idea? A game where raccoons build Kubernetes clusters. Genius.
But then you realize: You’ve been in this same tab for 7 hours. You’ve made 14 forks. You don’t remember what your actual startup does anymore.
Meanwhile, your production server is still down. You know because you got a PagerDuty alert, which you immediately fed into GPT-4 with the prompt: “Turn this into a haiku.”
Bonus Round: Other Distractions You Definitely Justified
- Notion AI: For drafting a product roadmap that became a 20-page sci-fi novella.
- Raycast AI: Asked it to “generate shell commands” and accidentally triggered a launch sequence for a digital bakery on AWS.
- Excalidraw: Where you “diagrammed infra” but really just drew increasingly angry stick figures labeled “me” and “tech debt.”
The Vicious Cycle
- Discover new AI dev tool on Twitter.
- Tell yourself it’ll save time.
- Spend 4 hours configuring it.
- Pivot startup around it.
- Repeat until you’ve built a no-code AI dev platform to help you manage your other AI dev platforms.
Conclusion: A Cry for Help (and Funding)
Having access to a dozen AI tools as an ADHD founder is like giving a toddler espresso and a box of fireworks labeled “Productivity.” You don’t build faster - you build sideways.
So next time you open yet another AI-powered terminal inside an AI-powered browser to debug an AI-generated script for your AI startup, remember:
You might not be shipping features, but you are building character.
(And probably several unpaid AI interns with vague autonomy clauses.)
P.S. If you’re a VC reading this, I swear I’m focused now. Just ignore the 37 branches titled final-rebrand-v10-BUT-FOR-REAL