LLMs may have immensely helped my RSI
LLMs may have helped my RSI
After years of repetitive strain injury from typing, a developer noticed his chronic forearm pain had largely disappeared. The shift coincided with letting AI agents write more code while he focused on design specs and code review, typing mostly English prose on the home row. He still writes code by hand when needed, but the reduction in awkward keystrokes—angled brackets, modifier keys, contortions—seems to have made a real difference. He shipped more code this year than ever before.
Without your health, you are nothing after all.
- notnullorvoid
What helped my RSI:
- Using mouse less
- Ergonomic keyboard
- Learning to type better (I still suck, but speed is fast enough, and I don't get a soar neck or fingers from my previous glance at KB then back to monitor and smash keys)
- Positioning top of monitor to eye level
- Gradually transitioning from programming through rapid trial and error, to building and exploring logical models of programs in my head, then type out some code that usually works.
All my experiments and usage of AI if anything lead to more typing rather than less.
- vaughands
I thought I would share. I don't see this discussed much and thought it was interesting (it's my own post) when doing some introspection today. Is it from moving up in my career and I just type a little less? Has the movement from typing in a code editor all day to writing more prose helped? It's hard to say for sure, but a fun observation. :) I am curious if anyone else has experienced the same.
- aussieguy1234
If you set up speech to text like voxtype, you won't even have to type the prompt into the AI and can do your programming almost entirely by voice.
I don't have RSI, but I do this whenever my arms get tired to make sure I don't end up with it.