19 September 2026
The clinical words for it are prosthetic, coping mechanism, support, and all three assume something is missing. I'm autistic and ADHD, I use AI to get thoughts out of my head intact, and that's an interface adapter, not a patch.
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You have the whole thing in your head. The argument, the three systems it connects to, the objection someone's about to raise and the answer to it, all at once, completely clear. Then you open your mouth and about a fifth of it comes out, in the wrong order, at the wrong speed. You can watch the room quietly decide you haven't thought this through.
I got the ADHD diagnosis a couple of years ago. The autism one landed earlier this year. That news in adulthood reassembles your timeline backwards, and decades of being told you're simultaneously too intense and not trying hard enough resolve into something with a technical shape. Nothing was broken. It was modern multi-threaded software running on legacy operational hardware.
The word for that is neurodivergent. I'm going to describe the rest of this in computer language, so the mapping up front: the brain is the processor, speech is the cable out of it, and what gets diagnosed as a deficit is, in my case, almost entirely a connector problem.
The thinking has never been the hard part. The internal world is vast and hyper-connected, tracking patterns across code, philosophy and art at once. The failure happens on the way out.
Verbal speech is an ancient, low-bandwidth serial cable.
It takes something multi-dimensional and squeezes it out one word at a time, in real time, with nothing to buffer into. For an autistic brain that cable carries far more than the words: tone to manage, background noise to filter, micro-expressions to read and price up, syntax to sequence by hand. It draws on the same budget as the idea, so the idea is what gets dropped. What's left sounds halting, or blunt, or disjointed, and the room reads that as the quality of the thinking rather than of the channel.
Every one of those is an I/O error. The processor is fine.
Clinical frameworks have words ready for whatever a neurodivergent person uses to get around this. A prosthetic. A coping mechanism. A support. Every one of them describes the tool and diagnoses the person: something is absent here, and the device is the apology for it.
An adapter assumes the opposite, and that's why I use the word. Both sides work. The ports don't match.
Nobody calls a USB-C to HDMI dongle a prosthetic for a laptop. The laptop isn't disabled. It has a perfectly good signal and a connector the projector was never built to accept, and the silicon in between is doing a conversion, not compensating for a deficit.
Swap the laptop for a neurodivergent brain and the projector for a room full of people, and that's the comparison I'm making. Neither end is faulty. The connector between them is.
So I dump the raw pattern in, disorganised and too fast and non-linear, in the shape it arrives. The model works as an externalised compiler: it steps the voltage down, it sequences the syntax, it gets the signal into a form another person can read without being fried by the delivery. The thought doesn't get better. It gets out.
Which isn't the same as a fix. There's no undo on the serial cable. Say it wrong in a meeting and it's out, in the room, done. The adapter doesn't repair the sentence I already said. It routes around the cable entirely.
The errors don't announce themselves. Years ago, on a client project, a director posted a compliment about my work in the team chat. I reacted with an emoji I'd read as a bashful, gee-thanks sort of smile. It doesn't mean that. It means cringe. He messaged me privately to ask what he'd said that was so cringe. I had no idea what he meant, and it was months before I worked out what I'd actually sent.
No error, no log, just a director quietly wondering why I'd sneered at his compliment. And that one wasn't even speech. The cable isn't only the mouth: any channel where the meaning sits in a convention nobody wrote down runs the same risk.
There's an objection that turns up whenever this is said out loud, rarely stated plainly. Here it is: writing this way is cheating. It only counts unaided, out of vocal cords and grey matter.
That's carbon chauvinism, and nobody applies it anywhere else. A notebook doesn't invalidate the idea it holds. A keyboard doesn't make the sentence less yours. Tools have been extensions of the nervous system for as long as there have been tools, and the line people want to draw at silicon is a preference for a material, not a standard for truth.
Skin and skull are where the body stops. They are not where the thinking stops.
When a brain is wired differently, reaching past that line is the same move humans have always made, fast enough that we get to watch it.
I didn't expect this to fold into the day job. Most of what I write about interfaces for agents is this problem with the arrow reversed: a model with a complete internal picture, a channel that can't carry it, and everyone blaming the model.
A design decision that only exists on a Figma canvas isn't a decision an agent can read, and when it guesses a hex value and gets it wrong, that guess is an I/O error in a system where nobody considered the port.
The fix is never to tell the agent to try harder. It's to stop forcing the signal through a channel that was never built to carry it.
Same correction, both directions. Machine-readable tokens are an adapter. So is a written brief instead of a meeting.
If you're neurodivergent and you use AI to get your thoughts out, stop calling it a crutch. That word does work you don't want done: it tells the room there's a deficit and the tool is the patch, when what happened is that you found a port that fits. You don't owe anybody a performance of doing it the slow way.
And if you build things: next time output looks stupid, check the channel before the intelligence behind it. That's true of a person who sounds halting in a meeting, and of an agent that invented a colour. In both cases you aren't looking at the thought. You're looking at whatever survived the cable.