Why I built a prosthetic brain

I need to explain something about how my brain works. It's going to sound like a superpower at first. Then it's going to sound like a curse. Both are true.

"I don't know what causes the switch but my focus is magnetic. Almost like an organic magnetic pull towards the object of my focus."

— 2023-09 | ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia interactions | chatgpt

Magnetic. That's the word. When I lock onto something, the rest of the world disappears. I can work for 14 hours and forget to eat. I can spend a week building something and not remember what day it is.

That sounds productive, right? Here's the problem.

"80% of my time are super valuable hyperfocused moments that the value inside gets killed because as I enter a new hyperfocus the previous ones become dead no matter how valuable they were."

— 2025-07 | Hyperfocus cognitive enhancement | chatgpt

Read that again. 80% of my productive output — dead. Not because the work was bad. Because I can't get back to it. The tunnel moved.

"Since I jump from one hyperfocus to another, and by definition when I'm in a hyperfocus, everything else is dead to me. It's not so much anxiety about getting back to it. It's just that I lack the cognitive control and mental clarity to actually... it's too taxing to get back into it."

— 2025-10 | claude-code

132 GitHub repos. 1,400+ commits. Dozens of domains mastered. Almost nothing shipped to completion. That was the pattern for years.

Then something changed.

"Another key point is that now that I have all my previous projects well documented, it is much less taxing. In other words, when I'm inside a hyperfocus session, it's much less of a risk for me to access my previous information, and this is probably the biggest concept of everything."

— 2025-10 | claude-code

The biggest concept of everything.

The system

I built an external brain. 359K messages, 106K embedded with semantic search, queryable in 256ms. Now when the tunnel moves, the previous context doesn't die. It's preserved. Accessible. Waiting.

The hyperfocus paradox isn't a problem to solve. It's a constraint to design around. Build external memory that survives context death. Ship within single hyperfocus sessions. Document obsessively so future-you can resume.

I'm not fixed. I'm augmented.