NeuroBait: I fine-tuned a model to spark dopamine for ADHD brain

A Backyard AI project. Built at home with a small model for a big impact

What is ADHD?

ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) is a common neurodevelopmental that affects how the brain processes information, regulates attention, and controls impulses.

It started with my wife

My wife has ADHD. I've watched her stand in front of a pile of laundry, know exactly what to do, and still not be able to start. Frozen, not lazy. For an ADHD brain the problem was never knowing what to do. It's the gap between knowing and starting.

Most ADHD AI tools get this wrong. They focus on diagnosis and theory: quizzes, checklists, neat to-do lists. But a to-do list for someone in a freeze is just more to choose between, plus a faint voice saying "try harder." Correct, and completely useless.

So I tried something different. I took the theory (executive dysfunction, task-initiation paralysis, the interest-based nervous system, think DSM clinical framing meets The Queen of Distraction) and tested it against something the research rarely has: real observation and practice, on the person I live with. What actually unfreezes her? Not a plan. A spark.

What NeuroBait does

NeuroBait doesn't make to-do lists. It lights up dopamine to make starting feel possible.

When you're stuck, it reads your conversation for what matters, a real deadline, a person or thing you care about, and answers in 3 to 6 warm sentences that flow naturally (no clinical labels, no bullet walls): it gets why you're stuck, reconnects you to something you love, and hands you one tiny action you can do right now. "Pull one shirt off the top of the pile. Just one."

No guilt. No lecturing. You, the active hero, not the patient.

The stack

A real model, trained on a real budget:

• Base: google/gemma-3-12b-it (dense Gemma 3 12B, standard Gemma3ForConditionalGeneration, chosen for reliable transformers + peft deployment)
• Method: 16-bit LoRA, not QLoRA, via Unsloth
• LoRA: r=16, alpha=16, dropout=0
• Epochs: 3 | LR: 2e-4 | Batch: 1 x grad_accum 8 | Max sequence: 2048
• Chat template: gemma-3, response markers <start_of_turn>user\n and <start_of_turn>model\n
• save_strategy="no" to avoid the known Unsloth/TRL checkpoint pickle bug
• Trained on modal.com with H100 80GB GPU
• Data: small, hand-curated, synthetic, built from real ADHD friction, not generic productivity tropes. Lesson learned: for a voice, dataset quality beats model size.
• Deploy: Hugging Face Space on ZeroGPU (zero-a10g) using Gradio + standard transformers + peft; base loads in 4-bit bitsandbytes NF4 and applies the LoRA adapter at runtime. No Unsloth at runtime, no GGUF deployment path.

Default model vs. fine-tuned

The base model isn't dumb, it's capable. But out of the box it still writes you a to-do list, just a more empathetic-sounding one: bold headers, bullets, leaked labels, long paragraphs. For a frozen brain, that wall of "help" is itself overwhelming.

The fine-tune behaves differently in kind. It drops the structure and speaks in warm, flowing prose. It gets shorter. It asks before it assumes. It threads your context back to you, so it feels written for you, not for a generic "overwhelmed user." It learned the voice, not the script.

Not just for ADHD

Here's what surprised me: this isn't only an ADHD tool.

We all hit that wall now: doom-scrolled into mush, overwhelmed by bloated feeds, unable to start the simplest thing. NeuroBait is warm by design. It works as dopamine relaxation for anyone drowning in overwhelm, a gentle, human nudge back to one small, doable thing. ADHD brains just need it most.

Where it's going

It started in my backyard, for one person. The hope is to extend it to everyone with ADHD, and to anyone who's ever felt stuck.

Next: open weights plus the full pipeline, bilingual (Indonesian and English), and most important, built with the community, not for it. ADHD tools have too long been designed by people who don't have ADHD. Real scenarios, real reactions, real feedback are the project.

If you have ADHD, love someone who does, or just feel overwhelmed too often, come try it and tell me where it's annoying. That feedback is the whole point. 🧠⚡

Check this out: https://huggingface.co/spaces/build-small-hackathon/NeuroBait

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