2. mirror: The Counter to Discounting the Positive
The gap it fills: cognitive distortion, specifically discounting the positive.
"Discounting the positive" is a CBT term for a thinking pattern where you mentally delete your own wins. You shipped three features, but your brain only renders the one bug. ADHD comes bundled with this so often that it feels like just being realistic. It is not realistic. It is a measurement error, and it is corrosive, because a brain that cannot see its own progress loses the dopamine that progress is supposed to pay out.
mirror reflects back what I actually did, grounded in evidence, not vibes. It reads the session, the commits, the closed tasks, and tells me plainly: here is what shipped. Not cheerleading. Receipts.
/mirror
Why it helps specifically: ADHD reward systems are under-fueled, and discounting the positive starves them further. When the skill says "you closed four tasks and shipped the auth flow," and points at the commits, the distortion has nothing to push against. I cannot argue with the log. The win gets to count, which is the entire point.
The reason this works is that it is external and evidence-based. If I tell myself "good job," my brain discounts it instantly. If a tool shows me the commit history of what I closed today, the distortion has no grip. Externalize the scorekeeping and the distortion loses.
3. pickup: Session Resume for Context-Switching
The gap it fills: context-switch recovery cost.
Every interruption tears down the mental model of what I was doing. Rebuilding it is the 23-minute reconstruction tax that, for an ADHD brain, runs longer and hits more often. The worst version is the overnight gap: I close the laptop mid-thought and the next morning the entire working model is just gone.
pickup reconstructs the session for me. It reads where I left off, what was in flight, what was blocked, and summarizes the open state before I write a single line.
/pickup
Why it helps specifically: it converts a cold start into a warm one. The reconstruction that used to eat the first half hour of every session, the part where I open files semi-randomly trying to jog the memory, gets done by the skill in seconds. I am not rebuilding the model. I am reading it back.
4. schedule: A Patch for Time Blindness
The gap it fills: time perception distortion.
Time blindness is an ADHD hallmark: you cannot feel time passing, so "I'll just fix one thing" becomes a four-hour rabbit hole, and a two-hour task gets estimated at twenty minutes. You ship on deadline panic because your brain has no internal clock to pace against.
schedule puts external markers on the work: it sets up recurring checkpoints and time-boxed runs so the passage of time becomes visible instead of imagined. It is the external clock my brain does not have.
/schedule
Why it helps specifically: ADHD does not respond well to "be more aware of time," because the awareness machinery is the thing that does not work. It responds to external structure. A skill that interrupts at a real interval and asks "you set 45 minutes for this, you are at 60, still the right task?" gives me the time signal my brain cannot generate, at the moment the drift is happening rather than after.
5. librarian: Reducing the Cognitive Load of Navigation
The gap it fills: working-memory overload from holding a whole codebase in your head.
Navigating a large codebase means holding a map of it in working memory: where things are, what calls what, which file owns which concern. ADHD working memory cannot hold that map, so every navigation becomes a fresh, expensive search, and the expense itself becomes a reason to avoid touching unfamiliar parts of the code.
librarian walks the knowledge layer for me. Instead of me grepping around trying to reconstruct where a behavior lives, I describe what I am after and it returns the relevant pieces and how they connect. It holds the map so I do not have to.
/librarian
Why it helps specifically: it collapses the navigation tax. The mental energy I would spend reconstructing "where does this live and what touches it" is exactly the executive-function budget I do not have to spare. Offloading the map means I can spend that budget on the actual change instead of on finding the place to make it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A real morning, lightly compressed, showing the five working as a chain rather than in isolation:
9:10 Sit down. No memory of yesterday's state.
/pickup -> "You were mid-refactor on the signal loop, JWT
middleware blocked on a cookie setting. 2 tasks open."
Cold start avoided. ~20 min reconstruction skipped.
9:14 Brain is foggy, not wired.
/adhd-task-triage -> hands me the low-initiation-cost task
(write the middleware test), not the hard one.
Momentum started instead of staring at the blank editor.
9:20 Need to change the auth schema but forget where it lives.
/librarian -> returns the schema file + everything that touches it.
Navigation tax collapsed. No grep spiral.
9:25 /schedule already running a 45-min checkpoint in the background.
At 10:10 it pings: "60 min on a 45 task, still the right one?"
Caught a hyperfocus drift before it ate the morning.
11:30 Brain says "you got nothing done."
/mirror -> "3 tasks closed, middleware shipped, schema migrated.
Here are the commits."
Distortion loses. The win counts.
None of these is doing anything a disciplined neurotypical developer could not do by hand. That is the point. They do it for me, the same way every time, so the doing does not depend on executive function I cannot summon on command.
How Do You Start Building Your Own?
Do not install five skills today. Pick the one deficit that costs you the most, mine was the cold-start reconstruction, and build or invoke the one skill that targets it. A skill is a SKILL.md file in .claude/skills/ that names what it does and when it triggers. Start there, use it for a week, and let the next-most-expensive gap tell you what to build next.
The pattern underneath all five is the same: name the executive-function gap precisely, then build a repeatable thing that fills it so you stop re-improvising around your own brain.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Claude Code skill?
A packaged capability you invoke by name (like /pickup) that runs a defined, repeatable workflow. Instead of re-prompting Claude from scratch each time, you call the skill and it runs the same proven steps every time.
Are these built into Claude Code?
Claude Code ships with a skill system and some bundled skills. Several here (like adhd-task-triage and mirror) are custom skills I built for my own setup. The transferable thing is the pattern: build a skill for any recurring executive-function gap.
Do I need ADHD for these to help?
No. They help anyone who context-switches a lot, undersells their progress, or loses the thread between sessions. ADHD just makes the gaps sharper, so the payoff comes faster.
How do I invoke a skill?
Type its slash command (for example /pickup) in Claude Code. Custom skills live in .claude/skills/ as a SKILL.md file that defines what the skill does and when it fires.
These skills are the executive-function layer on top of the working-memory layer from the CLAUDE.md guide. For the clinical picture of why each gap exists and how AI compensates, read how I use AI as an executive function prosthetic.
Originally published on chudi.dev