Avoiding surgery involved months of finger stretches, forearm massage, 2 keyboards and 2 mice at different elevations, typing with my hands hanging slack like a zombie. It worked. But, even typing this out 20 years later I can still feel the RSI hiding in the shadows. Since then I've avoided RSI by spending 10x more time thinking about code than typing it.

All that is setup for: There have been many times recently where I've thought "I know exactly what I want this code to look like. But, damn. That's going to be a lot of keypresses..." The effort is nothing. Risking nerve damage is the concern.

In those cases I have been thrilled be able to tell AI exactly what to make, how to refactor it, how to clean it up, clean it up more, yet more, still not done. All in less than 10% of the keypresses that would have been required to type it by hand.

I have experienced exactly what you describe here. I am battling RSI for more than a decade, it has nearly cost me my career. Like you and many others, I have tried all sorts of things. I got the most improvement from:

- An ergonomic split keyboard, with a custom layout - An ergonomic chair and desk setup - Relearning to type from the home row - Using dozens of custom shortcuts to reduce awkward hand movements - Yoga and stretching - Building a more active lifestyle with total body movement as a focus - Improving diet to reduce inflammation

Despite all those interventions I still suffered debilitating hand and wrist pain, which eventually crept into my shoulder blades and back muscles. Doctors and physios were useless or clueless. One doctor refused to acknowledge that RSI exists. No amount of physiotherapy helped.

Using LLMs to do (almost) all of my coding tasks has reduced my RSI pain and stress by half or more. I feel so much better and healthier. I still have pain, and I still have to work hard to manage it, but I will never go back to writing everything by hand.

Thank you for sharing, and for reading. Wishing you good health.

IMO LLMs are the best thing to happen to coding in my ~15 years of being in the game.

I wager they have probably added on another 5-10 years to my engineering career as I was contemplating getting out before they showed up.

Have also been convincing some friends that have "gone woods" over the years to put the woodworking tools down for a day or two and give them a go. So far so good, a few folks have found the spark again and it's been awesome to see them make digital things again too.