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MY EXECUTIVE FUNCTION IS A BROKEN ELEVATOR AND THE LLM IS THE RAMP

May 30, 2026

A cross-section of an exhausted cartoon human brain wearing a tiny construction hard hat, slumped at a chaotic desk buried under a thousand teetering folders each labeled “BRILLIANT IDEA — NEVER STARTED,” while a small friendly retro robot with a CRT-monitor head and a dial-up modem where its heart should be gently hands the brain a single index card reading “START HERE → STEP ONE,” the brain shedding one enormous grateful tear; in the background a glowing wheelchair ramp built entirely out of stacked index cards leads up to a door marked “FINISHED,” a motivational poster on the wall reads “SPEED BEATS PERFECTION,” a coffee mug on the desk is labeled “EXECUTIVE FUNCTION (EMPTY),” dramatic warm sunrise light slicing through dusty venetian blinds, a tiny “DO NOT AGONIZE” sticky note peeling off the monitor

I want to start with the part that’s embarrassing, because if I start with the argument you won’t believe the argument.

For most of my life, my problem was never ideas. I have ideas the way other people have lint. If you’ve been here a while you already know — thirty-ish unfinished novels, a mobile queer bookstore I’ve spec’d down to the LED color temperature, a book club, a serial, an app that schedules my television for me because choosing what to watch was somehow a thirty-minute crisis every single night. The ideas are not the problem. The ideas have never once been the problem.

The problem is the gap. The horrible, specific, ADHD-shaped gap between I have an idea and the idea exists in the world. That gap is where my best stuff goes to die. I’d get the spark, feel the dopamine, ride it for an afternoon, and then hit the part where you have to figure out what to actually do first — and the whole thing would just… evaporate. Not because I didn’t care. Because the part of my brain that’s supposed to take “big exciting thing” and turn it into “okay, step one, then step two” is, to use the clinical term, busted.

I used to think of it as laziness, because that’s what everyone helpfully told me it was for about thirty years. It is not laziness. Laziness is not wanting to do the thing. This is wanting to do the thing so badly it hurts and standing in front of it completely unable to find the door handle. My executive function is a broken elevator. The penthouse is full of stuff I’d love to get to. The elevator just doesn’t come.

Okay. That’s the embarrassing part. Here’s what changed.

A grand brass-and-velvet hotel elevator installed inside the lobby of a giant cross-section human brain, the elevator doors permanently stuck half-open with a hand-written “OUT OF ORDER (SINCE BIRTH)” sign taped crooked across them; a long velvet rope queue snakes through the lobby packed with anthropomorphized Ideas waiting their turn — a tiny novel manuscript checking its watch, a mobile-bookstore van idling impatiently, a ukulele tapping its foot — all of them dressed up with nowhere to go; the floor indicator above the doors is frozen between floors, the up-arrow flickering pathetically; a sad bellhop brain-goblin shrugs at the crowd; dramatic chandelier light, dust motes, a potted plant that has clearly died of old age waiting

The receipts

Sometime in the last several months I started using LLMs — not as a novelty, not to write my blog for me (you can tell, I promise), but as scaffolding for the exact thing my brain won’t do. And I have finished more things this year than I think I have in any year of my adult life. That’s not a feeling. I can point at them.

I have a team of them now. Five little persistent agents I built and named, because of course I did. There’s CORTEX, who tracks what’s happening across all my projects and never does the work, just keeps the map. There’s DIAL-UP, who runs a morning handshake with me — checks my email, reads CORTEX’s status, finds what’s actually unblocked, and then, and this is the part that gets me, asks “what’s your energy like today?” before handing me anything. It serves quick wins as “pings” and deep work as “downloads” and it never, ever dumps the whole list on me at once, because a whole list is how I drown. There’s GAUGE who finds the rot, SIGNAL who tells me when an idea is a bad idea, and MEGAPHONE whose entire job is to notice when I did something and say so out loud. I have a robot that gives me specific praise. Judge me. I’ve never finished more.

Then there’s the office. My office was a hoard. Not a fun hoard. A genuine, can’t-have-people-over, lost-objects-in-it hoard, and every time I looked at it the broken elevator just sat there in the lobby. So I made a plan — well, we made a plan — and the plan is the most ADHD-accommodating document I have ever read in my life. Phase 0: grab everything you need in one trip so you don’t break flow. Phase 1: clear the desk to nothing, because you need a quick win to unlock momentum. A decision rule printed right there: keep-here, keep-elsewhere, donate, trash — and if you hesitate, it goes in the MAYBE box. No agonizing. Speed beats perfection. It built in the breaks. It built in lunch. It built in a “no-slide-back system” for after. My office is clean. It has been clean for a while. I want you to understand that those two sentences have never been true at the same time before in my entire life.

There’s more and I’ll be quick about it, because this is the part where I’d normally drift off into a tangent about Magpie’s Library and I’m going to push myself back on track. I used one to take that mobile-bookstore daydream and turn it into a phased plan with actual go/no-go criteria, so it stopped being a fantasy and became a thing with a Phase 0 I could afford. (The book club launches June 3, by the way. The shop doesn’t exist yet. The reading life does.) I used one to research things I’d have rabbit-holed on for a week. I built Couch Commander, the little TV concierge, specifically to delete a recurring decision that was eating my evenings. And the issue tracker I run everything through only ever shows me the work that’s actually unblocked — which sounds boring and is, in fact, the single most important sentence in this post, because “here is the one thing you can do right now” is the opposite of the paralysis.

Notice the pattern. None of these made me smarter. Every single one of them did the same job: it took the thing my broken elevator can’t do — sequence it, start it, hold it in memory, decide the order — and built a ramp.

Five small retro robots holding a morning stand-up meeting on top of a suspiciously, miraculously clean desk; the leader is a friendly CRT-monitor-headed bot with a dial-up modem heart (labeled “DIAL-UP”) holding up a single index card that reads “1 THING. THAT’S IT. WHAT’S YOUR ENERGY?

A ramp. Say it with me.

Here’s where I plant the flag, and I’ve been building up to it the whole time, so here it is plain:

A reasonable accommodation, in the legal sense — the ADA sense — is a change that lets a person with a disability do the thing everyone else already gets to do. A wheelchair ramp. A screen reader. Extra time on the test. A quiet room. Glasses, if we’re being honest, are a reasonable accommodation that we collectively decided to stop being weird about a few hundred years ago.

Nobody tells a nearsighted person they’re cheating at seeing. Nobody pulls the calculator away from the kid with dyscalculia and says “do it the honest way.” We let dyslexic people use spellcheck and text-to-speech and we do not, as a society, call them frauds for it. We understand — at least in those cases — that the tool isn’t doing the living for them. It’s closing the gap between what their body or brain does on its own and what the task requires.

So when somebody tells me that using an LLM to scaffold my executive function is cheating — cheating at what, exactly? At being a person who finishes things? I wasn’t going to finish them. That was the whole disability. The tool didn’t skip the work; the tool is the only reason the work got done at all. Calling that cheating is just ableism that learned a new word. It’s the calculator argument in a fresh outfit, and it was wrong then too.

I’m not interested in the discourse. I’m interested in the clean office.

A police lineup against a height chart, but the “suspects” are assistive tools standing accused: a pair of reading glasses, a pocket calculator, a spellcheck cursor, a wheelchair ramp, and at the far end a glowing chat-bubble labeled “LLM” — all of them sweating under the interrogation light, a one-way mirror reflecting a smug detective; the height-chart wall behind them reads “CHEATING????” in big stenciled letters with a question mark count escalating in panic; the glasses are calmly filing their nails, completely unbothered, having clearly beaten this rap centuries ago; the wheelchair ramp has a tiny lawyer briefcase; harsh noir lighting, a single swinging bare bulb, a “EXHIBIT A: A CLEAN OFFICE” photo pinned to the corkboard

The part where I’m honest about it

And now the caveat, because I refuse to write the hype version of this, and because if I don’t say it Harper will give me a look.

This is a tool, not a cure. I want to be really clear about that. I did not download a personality. My ADHD is exactly as much ADHD as it was a year ago — I still lose my keys, I still changed a side character’s name twice in the same chapter last week, I still have the memory of a goldfish with a head injury. The LLM didn’t fix my brain. It built a ramp around one specific broken thing, and the broken thing is still broken. Ramps don’t heal legs. That’s not what ramps are for. That’s the entire point of ramps.

A cheerful cartoon brain in a wheelchair zooming triumphantly up a glowing index-card ramp toward a door marked “FINISHED” — while being a complete disaster in every other way: both its little legs are still in plaster casts scrawled with “STILL BROKEN LOL,” it is simultaneously dropping an enormous ring of keys straight down a storm drain, its phone is balanced on top of its own head while it frantically searches its pockets for the phone, a thought-bubble shows a single novel character wearing two different name tags; strapped to the wheelchair is a tiny fishbowl containing a goldfish with a head bandage, labeled “MY WORKING MEMORY”; a sign at the bottom of the ramp reads “RAMPS DON’T HEAL LEGS (THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT),” warm hopeful afternoon light, confetti, a small donkey mascot giving an enthusiastic and slightly concerned thumbs up

And it is not the right tool for every person with ADHD, and I’d be a jerk to imply otherwise. For some people this’ll add friction instead of removing it. For some it’ll be one more shiny thing to hyperfixate on instead of a help. For some the whole “talk to the machine” of it just won’t land, and that’s completely fine. I’m not handing out a prescription. I’m one guy telling you what closed the gap for me, with all the usual asterisks about brains being unique disasters.

But for me? The elevator’s still broken. I’ve just stopped waiting in the lobby for it. There’s a ramp now, and I built it, and I’m using it, and I finished a thing today.

Call it cheating one more time. I dare you. I’ll be in my clean office.

Stay weird, take the accommodation, and for the love of god put it in the MAYBE box and keep moving.

— Dylan