In the Age of AI, Your Keyboard Still Matters

If you’ve seen my keyboard, a Kinesis Advantage 360, you already know I’m a keyboard nerd. The constant clacking probably gave it away.

But honestly? The idea for this post started with elbow pain.

For years, I had pain in my right elbow. At first it was manageable. It would flare up and be gone the next day, so I shrugged it off. Six months later, I started getting numbness in my fingers. As a software engineer, that’s not the kind of thing you casually ignore.

I went to the hospital. No nerve damage. Nothing on the scans. The doctor’s best guess was simple: too much pressure on my elbow, day after day. The fix was months of physical therapy.

After months of therapy, plus a month of lighter work during parental leave, the pain finally went away. Then I went back to work. First day back, it was already coming back.

That was the moment I started digging into ergonomic keyboards, typing technique, and all the small habits I had never paid attention to before. I ended up with a split keyboard, realized my hand position had been terrible for years, and accepted that trackpads are awful if you use them all day.

Switching keyboards was brutal. I went from typing more than 100 words per minute to barely hitting 30. I made mistakes constantly. It felt like starting over, which is a humbling experience when typing is one of the main things you do for work.

What surprised me was that it wasn’t only about pain. Fixing how I typed made me notice how much mental friction can hide in something as basic as typing.

When typing is automatic, your thoughts mostly go straight to the screen. When it isn’t, part of your attention gets burned on finding keys, fixing mistakes, or reaching for the mouse. That sounds minor until you notice how often it happens. And in the AI era, a lot of our work still lives in prompts, terminals, chat windows, editors, and constant back-and-forth.

One concrete example: after switching to my split keyboard, I dropped to about 30 words per minute. After a month of practice, I was back around 100. So something that used to take me more than three minutes now takes closer to one. If you’re writing prompts, replying to AI agents, or bouncing around in the terminal all day, that gap matters more than you’d think.

And I didn’t get there through some extreme setup. It was mostly 15 minutes a day on practice sites like monkeytype.com, with the boring but effective approach of working on accuracy first and speed second.

Shortcuts

This is where keyboard efficiency starts paying for itself. Not only in typing speed, but in all the tiny interruptions you stop having.

Your development environment is basically a toolbox. You shouldn’t have to go looking for the tools every time.

Take something simple from my own workflow: searching for a function or variable across a codebase. Without a shortcut, it looks like this:

1. Move my hand to the mouse
2. Navigate to the search icon in my IDE
3. Click it
4. Move my hand back to the keyboard
5. Type my search term
6. Press Enter

With a keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+F in most IDEs), it becomes:

1. Hit the shortcut
2. Type my search term
3. Press Enter

None of that is dramatic on its own. But if you do some version of it dozens of times a day, those seconds start to stack up. More importantly, you stay in the problem. Your hands stay where they are. You don’t keep snapping your attention out of the work just to click around.

The same goes for opening terminals, switching tabs, accepting AI suggestions, running tests, or jumping between files. Each action is tiny. Together, they decide whether your tools feel invisible or whether they keep getting in your way.

The age of AI

I hear some version of this all the time: “Why bother with shortcuts or typing practice when AI can do the coding for you?”

And to be fair, there is some truth in it. AI is good at a lot of the mechanical stuff: boilerplate, first drafts, obvious fixes, even whole functions if the task is clear enough.

What gets missed is that we still have to drive the thing. As long as we work with AI through text, we still need to get our thoughts into the system quickly and clearly. That means writing prompts, refining output, reviewing code, fixing mistakes, and trying again.

AI might write some of the code, but you’re still the one who has to:

• Craft clear prompts that capture exactly what you want
• Review and refine AI suggestions
• Jump between files to understand context

Every one of those tasks happens through your keyboard and your editor. The more fluent you are there, the less energy you waste on the mechanics and the more you keep for the part that still matters most: understanding the problem and making good decisions.

So no, I don’t think AI makes keyboard efficiency irrelevant. If anything, it changes where the bottleneck is. I’m typing less code by hand than I used to, but I’m still spending all day expressing intent, reviewing output, and moving through tools quickly enough to keep the thread in my head.

An easy way to learn it

If you want to get better at this, I think there are two good starting points.

If you already know how to type and just want more speed and accuracy, try monkeytype.com. That’s what I used to climb back from 30 words per minute to around 100 in less than a month. It helps that it makes progress visible, which is useful when improvement feels annoyingly slow.

If you’re starting from scratch, or you need to rebuild your technique like I did, typingclub.com is a better place to start. It walks through the basics step by step, which matters when you’re trying to undo years of bad habits.

The main thing is consistency. Fifteen focused minutes a day beats two hours once a week. And the goal isn’t to become some typing champion. It’s simpler than that. You want typing to disappear into the background so your attention can stay on what you’re trying to say, build, or figure out.

Beyond typing speed

Once you’re comfortable with your typing speed, start looking at your daily workflow for repetitive actions. What do you do over and over that could have a shortcut? Maybe it’s opening your test runner, switching to your terminal, or pulling up a specific file you reference all the time.

Try this: pick one of those frequent actions and either find or create a shortcut for it. Use it religiously for a week until it’s muscle memory. Then move on to another one.

This is where the real magic happens. You’re not just shaving milliseconds off keystrokes - you’re eliminating the little context switches that break your concentration. And unlike chasing higher WPM scores (which plateaus fast), streamlining your workflow keeps paying dividends as long as you’re using those tools.