> Unfortunately, I can't not use AI because it provides the best speech recognition I've ever used and, going along with hand problems, it now allows me to write code after a three-year absence from that skill.

I'll second this. The combination of Whisper + LLM makes speech recognition fantastic. I occasionally have arm pain from typing, and this is a Godsend.

I don't use it to write code - but in my experience stuff like emails + docs was the greater source of pain (one generally types slower while coding).