What actually helped my carpal tunnel after 18 months of trial and error

I got diagnosed with carpal tunnel about 18 months ago. Numbness in my thumb and first two fingers, burning at night, the whole mess. Working as a software developer meant I couldn't just stop using my hands.

Here's what actually helped me. Not medical advice, just what worked after a lot of trial and error.

Night splints
This was the first thing my doctor suggested and honestly I should've done it sooner. I wore rigid wrist splints on both hands while sleeping. It took about two weeks before the nighttime burning stopped. I hated them at first, felt like I was sleeping in handcuffs, but they made more difference than anything else I tried.

Nerve glides
Three times a day. Takes maybe two minutes. The basic one where you make a fist, extend your fingers, bend your wrist back, then extend your thumb. There are a bunch of variations online. The key for me was doing them consistently, not just when the pain flared up.

Ergonomics I actually stuck with
Split keyboard, Kinesis Freestyle, and a vertical mouse. Monitor at eye level so I'm not craning my neck forward. Nothing fancy, but the split keyboard especially meant I could keep my wrists flat instead of angled inward.

Breaks that aren't just scrolling on my phone
Timer on my desk, 25 minutes on, 5 off. During the 5 minutes I stand up and move. Not scrolling. Not "resting my hands" while doomscrolling Twitter. Actually getting up. It sounds too basic to matter, but it stopped the pain from piling up over the course of a day.

Dictation, not a replacement, just fewer keystrokes
This one surprised me. I wasn't expecting voice typing to help as much as it did. I use a few different tools:

Apple Dictation for quick messages, it's built in and free.

Tried Dragon, but it's expensive and honestly felt like software from 2010.

Tried Wispr Flow ($18/mo). Worked fine in normal apps, but the paste-based insertion broke constantly on remote desktop sessions I use for client work.

What I use most now is DictaFlow ($7/mo). Hold a hotkey, talk, release, text shows up at your cursor. The feature I didn't know I needed is mid-sentence correction by voice, if you stumble over a word you say a correction phrase and it deletes back and retypes without touching the keyboard.

I also use Voice In (Chrome extension, free tier) for web-based stuff like Google Docs.

I'm not replacing typing. I still type. But cutting daily keystrokes by half gave my wrists enough recovery time between sessions that the numbness stopped creeping back. That was the real win.

About 6 months to feel mostly normal
The first month I noticed no change and almost gave up on the whole routine. By month three the nighttime numbness was mostly gone. By month six I could work a full day without thinking about my hands. I still wear the night splints. Still do the nerve glides. Still use dictation. It's maintenance now.

What's worked for everyone else here? Carpal tunnel seems to hit everyone different, what combo of things actually stuck for you?