How I got my wrist pain under control after a year of trial and error (developer, typing 10+ hrs/day)

Long time lurker here...my wrists were basically wrecked about a year ago. I'm a developer, typing 10+ hours a day. Sharp burning in both forearms, and some mornings I couldn't even hold a coffee mug without flinching.

Here's what actually made a difference for me. I'm not saying it'll work for everyone, but after a year of trial and error, this is what got me from daily 3/10 pain to basically nothing.

Exercises that helped
Tendon glides first thing in the morning. Three sets of 10. It took about a month before I noticed anything. I also did wrist flexor stretches, the kind where you extend your arm palm up and pull back on your fingers with the other hand. Prayer stretches too. I do all of these 2-3 times a day now, and it takes maybe 3 minutes total.

What I changed at my desk
I got a split keyboard, the Kinesis Freestyle. That was the biggest hardware fix by far. It took me about two weeks to adjust to the layout, but my wrist angle is way more natural now. I also switched to a vertical mouse, and raised my monitor so I'm not hunching forward.

The thing nobody told me about breaks
I used to power through 3-4 hours without moving. Now I use a timer, 25 minutes on, 5 off. During those 5 minutes I actually stand up and walk around. Not just scroll on my phone. It sounds stupidly simple, but it made a real difference in how my hands felt by 3pm.

Dictation, the part I didn't expect to help as much as it did
I was skeptical about voice typing at first, but it ended up cutting my daily keystrokes by maybe 50-60%. That gave my hands enough recovery time between typing sessions that the pain stopped piling up.

I use a few different tools depending on what I'm doing:

For quick stuff like Slack messages or one-line replies I just use Apple Dictation. It's built in, fine for short bursts, not worth paying for.

For longer writing, emails, docs, code comments, I switched between a couple. Wispr Flow ($18/mo) is solid, but the paste-based insertion broke on remote desktop sessions I use for client work. Talon is powerful but has a steeper learning curve than I had patience for.

What I use most now is DictaFlow ($7/mo). Hold a hotkey and talk, release and it types wherever your cursor is. The feature that actually made it stick, if you mess up mid-sentence you say a correction word and it deletes back and retypes by voice. Sounds minor, but when you're dictating a whole email it saves you from grabbing the keyboard constantly.

There's also Voice In, a Chrome extension with a free tier, which I use specifically for web forms and Google Docs. Different tool, different job.

None of this replaces typing. I still type. But spreading the load across my voice and hands meant I wasn't hammering the same tendons for 10 hours straight.

Took about 4 months to feel normal-ish
The first month nothing changed. The second month I noticed I wasn't wincing in the morning. By month four I could do a full workday without thinking about my hands. I still do the stretches. I still use dictation. It's maintenance now, not emergency repair.

What's worked for other people here? Everyone's RSI is different, so what combo of things worked best for you?