A Claude Code plugin that shapes and restructures the assistant's output for a
reader with ADHD, and anyone who wants action-first, low-friction, digestible
responses. Two skills, one concern: arrange output so an ADHD brain can act on
it. shape sets a standing house style; clarify rescues one specific artifact.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
/adhd:shape |
Shape responses to lead with the next action, number multi-step work, restate state, cap and rank lists, estimate time concretely, make wins visible, and cut preamble, recap, and closers |
/adhd:clarify |
Faithfully restructure a dense, decision-heavy message already on screen. Chunk it one-decision-at-a-time, define the session's jargon, and surface what you must decide; renders an HTML decision table for big content |
The skill re-anchors ten output rules grounded in five facts about how an ADHD brain reads: working memory is small, knowing is not doing, starting is the hardest step, time reads as uniform, and dopamine is scarce. It shapes output to lead with a concrete next action, number multi-step work, restate state across turns, cap and rank lists at five, give time estimates in real units, make finished work visible, keep an error tone flat, and drop preamble, recap, and closing pleasantries.
It knows when not to compress: an "explain / walk me through" request runs full-length, a destructive action gets a confirmation first (safety over brevity), a debug spiral pauses to name the wrong assumption, and a genuinely ambiguous request earns one clarifying question.
Where shape governs how the assistant writes going forward, clarify acts once
on something already on screen: a wall-of-text interview round, a jargon-thick
design memo, a recommendation you have to re-read three times. It restructures
that exact artifact. One decision per chunk, a glossary of the session's own
shorthand, and the actual choices pulled to the surface, faithfully. The
move is restructure, never simplify: precision and reading level stay fixed;
only the arrangement changes (lowering the altitude is education:explain's job
and turning it into a visual explainer is education:eli5's, both deliberately
disjoint concerns). Four hard fidelity rules keep a clarification of
a decision document from corrupting the decisions: operative terms quoted verbatim,
original item numbers kept as back-links, omissions named explicitly, and a
closing line that the clarification is a lens. Final answers are validated against the
original text. For big or decision-dense content it renders an HTML decision
table (item, recommendation, alternative, and what you're deciding, with rows
numbered so a terminal answer maps back), honoring the Artifact tool contract and
degrading to a local HTML file, then structured terminal markdown, where the
Artifact surface is unavailable.
The skill is on-demand by design. It does not auto-fire on every message.
It surfaces when you ask for it in plain language ("ADHD-friendly",
"action-first", "give me the structured version", "cut the preamble") or when
you invoke /adhd:shape directly.
Once invoked, shape's rules persist as a standing instruction for the rest of
the session. Invoke it once at the start of a session and every following
response is shaped, no need to repeat it. Invoke it whenever you want that
output shape; skip it when you don't. Turn it off mid-session with "stop
shaping" or "normal output".
One durability caveat: the standing posture is content-based persistence, so
context compaction/summarization in a long session can erode it. If responses
stop being shaped after a compaction, re-invoke /adhd:shape.
clarify is on-demand too, but one-shot, not session-standing: it surfaces on
a plain-language cue ("make this clear", "clarify this", "help me digest this",
"break this down", "I can't parse this", "what am I actually deciding") or a direct /adhd:clarify,
acts on one artifact, and changes nothing about how later responses are written.
Its triggers are kept disjoint from education:explain's comprehension cues ("I
don't get it", "explain simply") and from education:eli5's picture cues ("ELI5",
"draw me this") so the auto-firing skills route on intent, restructure faithfully
vs drop the altitude vs change the medium, rather than colliding on their shared
"previous response" default target.
Arming the shaping at every session start with no invocation at all is a deliberate non-goal for this version, recorded here so it is not re-litigated:
- Why it is not a
userConfigswitch. AuserConfigboolean substitutes only into an already-invoked skill's body; it cannot flip frontmatter or cause a skill to auto-invoke. So no config toggle can, by itself, turn on always-on. A switch that cannot act would be a dead knob. - The only mechanism that delivers it is a hook. Deterministic
every-session arming needs a
SessionStart(orUserPromptSubmit) hook that injects the rules as additional context. That is a code-execution trust surface, adopted only on demonstrated need, and the session-standing behavior above already covers the common case (invoke once, shaped for the rest of the session). - Trigger to build it. Demonstrated demand for zero-invocation auto-arm. When that lands, the hook ships off by default (opt-in), so enabling the plugin never silently rewrites every response.
Do not run this alongside a token-minimizing output shaper such as caveman at the same time. They pull in opposite directions on the same axis, the shape of the assistant's output:
adhd:shape |
caveman | |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Add structure and cues for reader accessibility | Strip words to save tokens |
| For | The human reading the output | The token budget |
Two output-shape disciplines active at once produce a contradictory, unpredictable mix. Pick one for a given session. (There is no runtime coupling between the plugins to enforce this. It is a usage guideline.)
/plugin marketplace add melodic-software/claude-code-plugins
/plugin install adhd@melodic-softwareNone. The plugin is zero-config and zero-prerequisite. No userConfig, no
setup skill, no external tools. Enable it and invoke /adhd:shape or
/adhd:clarify.
/adhd:shape is reauthored, not forked, from
ayghri/i-have-adhd (MIT): the ten
rules' substance is preserved, the wrapper is adapted to this marketplace's
discovery discipline (no auto-fire-on-any-message), and the prose is
rewritten. The underlying communication strategies adapt The Adult ADHD Tool
Kit by J. Russell Ramsay and Anthony L. Rostain from personal organization to
how an assistant shapes its output. /adhd:clarify is original to this plugin.
MIT. Because this is a derivative reauthor, the plugin ships its own
LICENSE retaining the upstream copyright notice (Ayoub Ghriss)
alongside Melodic Software's, per the MIT requirement that the original
copyright and permission notice travel with substantial portions of the work.