I was playing piano for the first time in a while the other day and noticed: I didn’t feel any RSI. Maybe a bit and some tenderness, but not much at all. And no, I don’t mean recursive self improvement that is so trendy and topical right now. You see, for many years (starting as early as 2017) I had suffered some form of repetitive strain injury from as far as my doctors and I could tell was from simply typing on a keyboard and using my keyboard simply too much. I was learning to play piano, as you can imagine from the prior passage. This all added up to quite the strain on my arms at the end of the day. There has been good periods and bad periods since that time, but I remember coming home some days and my forearms would just be absolutely burning. The pain is the sort that you don’t forget. You experience it and never forget. I even read books such as “The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain” to try and reduce this. You don’t start reading books for treating your pain; you grasp at them because you’re desperate.
I learned through the years to manage this, exercise more and take more breaks. I had gotten the pain down to some periods of 0-2 a month at most and tried all the usual stuff: ergonomic keyboards, more breaks, less time at a keyboard and various other techniques. Many of these things helped a lot but going a full day could be quite the task if it was a particularly heavy day. I also learned to type on home row retraining years of bad habits when I realized the some of the strain was coming from moving my wrist all over the keyboard and not keeping things straight. So, all this to say that I came a long way from the weekly pain that I would be experiencing that was quite a burning feeling.
But the most noticeable days of pain had something in common: the types of keys I would be striking. You see, I would be able to type 20 pages of a design document with some rest in-between and not feel much at all. Sure, I might have some soreness from striking the keys (and still do, after writing a post like this one I may need some small breaks in between if not using voice dictation). But this was nothing compared to the days where I would write code for 4-5 hours in a stretch. This was even more common when I was a junior. This would normally involve trying to type special characters all over the keyboard. Hitting angled brackets, hitting various FN keys, striking home, end, tons of modifier keys, contorting my wrist in all sorts of ways that I really should not be. This was part of the motivation to learn to type “the right way”: to reduce these types of problems. Probably something that made it worse is that my hands are much smaller than average as a male. My finger span could barely reach an octave if I tried and much more than this is tough:
So, yeah. Small hands. I had similar problems raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and never really thought about it much until I started talking with some of my raid members and realized they were using combos that would involve Ctrl and up to the number 5! I cannot make that reach without some serious stretching that you can definitely feel.
Something changed slowly in 2026 though. I still write quite a bit of code by hand when it’s called for and needed. But increasingly, more code is being written by agents. When I want to do small refactors that are mechanical, I simply ask for then. An entire feature that I might write out in the afternoon which could span 4 - 5 hours of typing and debugging are replaced with prompts and maybe 30 minutes of manual refinement. I spend more time writing good design specifications and reviewing that of others. I review more code, but I am typing more on home row as a result. I might actually write more character per character than I used to but I am spending less time all over the keyboard and more time just typing… English prose. All that fits in the span of my fingertips. It is also probably true that I spent more time in meetings which is a natural consequence of becoming more senior. But to be clear: I shipped more code this year probably than any other year before it (I’m working on a greenfield product, working in Healthcare prior it was a different story).
I woke the other day thinking: hmm, I’ve not felt some arm pain in any serious capacity in quite some time. That’s interesting. I’ve felt some fatigue, sure. I mentioned that in my recent post talking about my new Macbook Air here. But serious, burning pain? It’s been quite some time! Perhaps it could be because I simply spend more time writing essays rather than moving my hands all over a keyboard pecking at keys.
I have my own set of complicated feelings of LLMs (gone are the bouts of satisfaction I would get hammering out code in an afternoon and watching it work at the end of the day). However, it seems increasingly more likely that from a health perspective perhaps they have been a boon to me. Or perhaps I am just senior enough now that it’s no longer a problem. At any rate, if the machines ultimately let me live a healthier life, then so be it. Without your health, you are nothing after all.