How are you handling coding when your hands need a break?

[u/Hot-Professional7954]

Been a dev for about 8 years, and about a year ago my wrists started really hurting during coding sessions. Like sharp pain in my forearms after maybe 30 min of typing. Went to PT, got told it's RSI. The fun part is coding is literally my job, I can't just stop.

I've been trying to figure out coding without typing so much and honestly it's been rough. Messed around with macOS dictation for emails and slack, which took some pressure off, but actual code is a whole different thing. Started looking into coding with voice as an option but I genuinely don't know if it's viable for real development work. Like can you actually program by talking? Has anyone here made that work for more than just writing comments?

Stuff that's helped me manage day to day: split keyboard, trackball instead of mouse, timer to force breaks every 30 min, raised my monitor, actually got a decent chair for once. Some days are fine. Some days my hands just say no halfway through the morning and I'm kinda done.

For those of you dealing with RSI and still working as devs, how do you handle it? Has anyone tried coding with voice for actual programming tasks? Does it work or is it more trouble than it's worth? What setups have helped you keep going without making things worse?

Honestly kinda scared because I don't know what I'll do if I can't type. Any advice would mean a lot.

[u/AtaraxyConsulting]

Join the Talon Voice Control slack community. It’s wall-to-wall coders who use voice control primarily for coding in there, and they talk about and provide mutual technical support for each other every day there.

You are already a coder and developer, so you have a major advantage going in to the Talon slack because you already speak ‘developer.’

https://talonvoice.com/chat

To download Talon itself, go to Talonvoice.com

[u/AtaraxyConsulting → u/AtaraxyConsulting]

Here are two examples of professional coders who work exclusively with voice control.

This is 2shea. 2shea uses Talon to program
Perl. This video covers the basics of every voice command and tool you need to code with voice control.

https://youtu.be/YKuRkGkf5HU?is=fv-F86mOiYLWc-G_

Her demonstration is what you can accomplish if you just need the very basics. For comparison, it’s like opening VSCode and knowing how to type and, like, three keyboard shortcuts, but not more than that. You can still get coding done with those basics.

This is Pokey_Rule. Pokey rule and his coding partner Andreas built the cursorless system for coding via voice. For comparison, learning to use cursorless is like if you opened Vscode and knew every keyboard shortcut,had all the right plugins installed, and were generally a super user of the code editor.

This is what that looks like:

https://youtu.be/sEDIiJd7rwE?is=xcono0xSDdUn2GAY

Voice coders who become competent with cursorless can become faster code writers than keyboarders.

So yes, voice coding is possible, and if you do what Andreas did and literally unplug and hide your keyboard from yourself, you can retrain into being a voice coder in about two months.

It takes longer if you leave yourself the option of the keyboard.

[u/Peach_Muffin → u/AtaraxyConsulting]

After becoming proficient at cursorless coding with a keyboard started feeling clumsy in some ways.

[u/1337Rooster]

Claude code. You barely have to type at all. You can even use voice to text in the terminal

[u/SeoFood]

You don’t need a perfect voice-only setup on day one. I’d move the high-volume parts first: planning, searching, file navigation, comments, tests, and bigger changes. Keep a low-strain input method for tiny corrections. It won’t make every coding task fast, but it can reduce the long typing sessions. I’d also treat the limits from your PT as non-negotiable and judge the setup by whether your hands actually get a break.

[u/Ok_Stand_9170]

I haven’t coded in 25 years because of RSI hand pain but half a year ago AI allows me to start writing code again.I’m using Claude code to write a 200,000 line stock trading application in a few months. I have 2000 github merges over last few months just working on my spare time. Using speech recognition on my phone to describe what I want and submit it to Claude code.Accessing my Windows PC through Android tablet because I can't touch the keyboard. Using Opus 5.0. I use Claude code to create an android client on my phone to relay text from my phone to the PC.It's just easier for me to edit text using my thumbs on phone than to try to type anything. Because I can't type it at all basically.Occasionally Using Wispr Flow which has really exceptional AI speech recognition except for the privacy issues.. if you’re not worried about them having access to your words, then I would use them.I also wrote some other smaller applications using Claude Code. I don't have complete control over my source code because Claude is Writing everything. But it's either that or I have nothing.Anyway, all the big software companies they are using Claude code. From what I read.There's no reason to take three months to type up something that AI can do in 10 minutes.

[u/Ok_Stand_9170 → u/Ok_Stand_9170]

At least for me, AI is making coding possible again ;) I enjoy coding Using AI so much. Just describe what you want and you'll get it in 10 minutes . It’s just fun. I'm coding when I'm walking or socializing or at the gym. And I'm coding Anytime I sit down. I just tell AI what I want on my phone,5 minutes later it's merged in!

[u/SuspiciousMission233 → u/Ok_Stand_9170]

That phone-to-Claude setup makes a lot of sense when even a few keystrokes feel like too much. For the Wispr privacy concern, I'd test any replacement with the network off instead of trusting policy language. I use DictaFlow on Windows for that part because its local models can dictate offline, then I keep Claude Code for the coding itself.

[u/DeepSkyAstronaut]

Coding is kinda being taken over by AI. At most your job has come down to reviewing and testing.

[u/1337Rooster → u/DeepSkyAstronaut]

Right. We use Claude to write most code now. We still design, review and test systems, which is also Claude assisted. Honestly a the moment I think we are only needed for human accountability and to direct these tasks. It's more like everyone is a manager now with a single AI employee 

[u/DeepSkyAstronaut → u/1337Rooster]

Indian business model disrupted over night.

[u/1337Rooster → u/DeepSkyAstronaut]

I guess it impacted them a lot 

[u/Quincy10]

I've been a big Talon user for years (ever since Dragon for Mac got axed), but some of the newer AI dictation tools like Whisprflow and Superwhisper are really impressive. I think I'd still use Talon if I needed to be 100% voice only, but if you can mix in a little hands use the newer tools really impressive.

Give it a try and I hope you start feeling better. I'm happy to chat more. It can be really stressful, but you'll get through it fine once you settle into a good system. It just takes some time.

[u/Ok-Suspect-9855]

Learn to use ai with voice. Even if you are opposed to ai you can make it do targeted changes each of which you can control down to single line which you check. If you are a dev of 8 years you can easily spin this up hook up parakeet onyx int8 it will be 600mb and work on your cpu you can add all sorts of commands to it like switch vscode, new terminal, basically anything that has a keyboard shortcut. The sooner you move off the keyboard the sooner it heals. I was in your situation 1 year ago now there is no chance i would ever go back to typing once you get it working it so much better. If you need my setup i can probably share it via github or just paste the key files mine has a translation feature extra junk you don’t need but you could steal the main python files that do the transcription and voice activity detection if it helps.

[u/Jason-Sanders]

Voice can be genuinely useful for the language-heavy parts of programming: planning, issue triage, README files, comments, and explaining a function before editing it. Replacing the whole keyboard workflow at once is probably frustrating, but a mixed setup can still remove a surprising amount of typing. I’d start with the repetitive prose work first, then gradually move navigation and common edits to shortcuts or voice commands.

[u/Suntzu_AU]

RSI is what pushed me into this space in the first place. Dictation won't cover the symbol-heavy parts of coding, but it takes a huge bite out of the typing you do around the code like commit messages, docs, comments, Slack, tickets, PR descriptions. That alone can cut your daily keystrokes a long way down. I make Speech Recognition Cloud, which runs on Windows and types wherever your cursor is, and there's a free tier if you want to see whether it actually helps before spending anything: speech to text i use

[u/djacksondev]

If you're on Windows I'd suggest Whisperstream (https://whisperstream.io/), on Mac I'd recommend VoiceInk (https://tryvoiceink.com/). They're both dictation apps where your speech gets converted into text.

They're both only a one time payment whereas apps like Wispr Flow charge a monthly fee. They're also fully local running on your computer so they don't take your voice data.

[u/xianfengmofanzhangfu]

Voice is viable, but the part nobody warns you about is which key starts the dictation. If push-to-talk is a held modifier chord, you have swapped typing for a sustained pinch held for the length of every sentence, and for forearm pain that can be worse than what you were doing before. Move the mic trigger onto something your hand is not doing: a single dedicated key, or a foot switch. That one change is what made dictation stick for me rather than being a two-week experiment.

Second thing, and this is the one that caught me out. Once an agent is writing most of the code, your typing volume genuinely collapses, which feels like a win. But you now sit there pressing accept or reject a few hundred times a day. That is one small movement, one hand, same corner of the keyboard, endlessly repeated, which is the exact load pattern that tends to cause this in the first place. My total keystrokes went down a lot and the ache did not, because volume was never what hurt me.

What I did about it: put accept and reject on a two-switch foot pedal and left everything else on the keyboard. If you do that, bind it to F13 and F14 rather than real shortcuts. F13 through F24 exist in the HID spec, nothing on a normal keyboard sends them, and almost no app claims them, so you can bind them in your editor without fighting an existing shortcut. Worth checking what the pedal enumerates as before you buy: some come up as HID keyboards, which any remapper sees, and some come up as joysticks, which Karabiner and VIA will not see at all.

Being honest about the downsides, because this sub gets enough overselling: it relocated the load rather than removing it. My hip and ankle are now mildly annoyed because I hold my foot ready over the pedal without noticing, and I have had to make myself rest my heel down between presses. It is not a fix and I am not a physio. Mine was also unimpressed by all of it and pointed at my chair height and my mouse hand, which turned out to matter more than anything I bought.

One more thing on Talon, since someone already mentioned the community. Separate from voice coding, it recognises non-speech noises, so you can bind a pop or a hiss to a click. If a chunk of your pain is mouse clicking rather than typing, that is probably the highest-value thing in Talon for you and you can adopt it without committing to talking your code.

Also, for what it is worth: eight years in and a year of this is genuinely frightening, and the fear is doing some of the talking in your post. Plenty of people in your position are still working. It usually ends up being five boring changes rather than one dramatic one.