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Comment by iwontberude | Hacker News Reader

I stopped writing as much code because of RSI and carpal tunnel but Claude has given me a way to program without pain (perhaps an order of magnitude less pain). As much as I was wanting to reject it, I literally am going to need it to continue my career.

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You aren't the first person I have heard say this. It's an under-appreciated way in which these tools are a game-changer. They are a wonderful gift to those of us prone to RSI, because they're most good at precisely the boilerplate repetitive stuff that tends to cause the most discomfort. I used to feel slightly sick every time I was faced with some big piece of boilerplate I had to hammer out, because of my RSI and also because it just makes me bored. No longer. People worry that these tools will end careers, but (for now at least) I think they can save the careers of more than a few people. A side-effect is I now enjoy programming much more, because I can operate at a level of abstraction where I am actually dealing with novel problems rather than sending my brain to sleep and my wrists to pain hell hammering out curly braces or yaml boilerplate.

Now that you point this out, since I started using Claude my RSI pain is virtually non-existent. There is so much boilerplate and repetitive work taken out when Claude can hit 90% of the mark.

Especially with very precise language. I've heard of people using speech to text to use it which opens up all sorts of accessibility windows.

Sorry to hear that and whilst it wasn't my original goal to serve such a use case I wonder if being able to interact with Claude Code via voice will help you? On MacOS it uses free defaults for TTS and ASR but you can BYOK to other providors. https://github.com/robdmac/talkito

I’m going to try it out tonight thank you

I find it very effective to use a good STT/dictation app since giving sufficient detailed context to CC is very important, and it becomes tedious to type all of that.

I’ve experimented with several dictation apps, including super whisper, etc., and I’ve settled on Wispr Flow. I’m very picky about having good keyboard shortcuts for hands-free dictation mode (meaning having a good keyboard shortcut to toggle recording on and off), and of course, accuracy and speed. Wispr Flow seems to fit all my needs for now but I’d love to switch to a local-only app and ditch the $15/mo sub :)

Are you using dictation for text entry

Great suggestion! I will be now :)

Superwhisper is great. It's closed source, however. There may be other comparable open spurce options available now. I'd suggest trying superwhisper, so you know what's possible and maybe compare to open source options after. Superwhisper runs locally and has a one time purchase option, which makes it acceptable to me.

Talkito (I posted the link further up) is open source and unlike Superwhisper it makes Claude Code talk back to you as well - which was the original aim to be able to multitask.

Talkito looks to be just a front for cloud services https://github.com/robdmac/talkito#provider-configuration -- that's a really limited definition of "open source", especially for something that itself is AGPL licensed.

Talkito does indeed support all the popular TTS and ASR cloud providers so you can bring your own key. But even without a key, on Mac it can use the system default TTS and googles free ASR for input.

So whats the benefit? Well for Claude Code this wrapper effectively bridges those TTS/ASR systems and CC so the voice interface is now there (CC doesn't have one). It doesn't just rely on MCP either (although it does start an MCP server for configuring via prompting) but instead directly injects the ASR and directly reads out CC's output when on.

It is free and open source so folks can inspect it and check it's not doing anything nefarious, so that others can contribute if they should choose. And the license is what it is as that seems to be the advice on this forum if you want to make sure a company can't just make a paid service out of your work.

check out https://talonvoice.com !

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