A way to work despite chronic pain

Hi, I'm Maciej.

I'm a software engineer with fibromyalgia (a chronic pain condition). Practically, it means this: I pay for every keystroke with pain, the pain accumulates, and I have a finite budget of keystrokes per day. When it runs out, it runs out.

So I built a way to work that doesn't spend it.

I program by voice.

For years that meant Talon Voice — and if you've tried it, you know it's a grind. Every symbol spoken, every cursor move a command. It worked, and I did it, because it was the only way.

Then the ground shifted — twice. Speech-to-text got good enough (Whisper and what came after), and LLM-based coding tools made it possible to program without your hands on every character. For most developers that was a convenience. Some of you code from your phone now. For me it's the difference between working and not working — so I pushed it further than most. Voice is how I talk to the system, and AI agents are the hands: they do the typing, the clicking, the repetitive parts, on their own machines, while I direct. I still read every line. My hands just aren't the bottleneck anymore.

It's not an experiment. The setup has logged:

It works. It just doesn't fit the shape of a job.

It worked well enough that after years of being unable to hold a job, I got one at a major tech company. But a setup like this can't run on a corporate laptop. So I was back to the mouse — spending twenty minutes and a chunk of the day's budget moving images from a markdown report into the company doc tool, one click at a time, and wondering, the whole time, why there still isn't a way to just do this. Things that are a minor annoyance for everyone else were, for me, the whole afternoon.

And the deeper problem: nine-to-five assumes a body that works on schedule. Mine doesn't. When it says stop, it's not a suggestion — and a workplace built around fixed hours has no room for that. That mismatch, more than anything, is what I'm trying to engineer my way out of.

Earlier this year I lost that job while on medical leave. I'm on a rehabilitation benefit now — it came through at roughly half of what I'd planned around. This fundraiser is about closing that gap for the next few months.

What the money is for

Two things I'm not doing, and one thing I am.

Physiotherapy and psychotherapy — once a week each. That isn't an ambition, it's the floor where either of them starts doing anything at all. Around PLN 200 a session. I'm currently at zero on both.

They aren't two separate problems. Fibromyalgia isn't damage sitting in a muscle — it's a nervous system with the gain turned up and the brakes turned down. Pain that should fade keeps climbing instead, and the inhibition that's supposed to damp it barely fires. That inhibition isn't neutral, either: it works worse when the body reads the situation as unsafe. So the tissue and the state of the system aren't two departments. Physio works the body. Therapy works the amplifier. Do one, skip the other, and you plateau — I've done plenty of that already.

And the setup itself. This is my workplace, and like any workplace it has a monthly bill — the machines and the models the agents run on. It's the reason I can work at all in a shape my body tolerates. Right now it competes with rent, and rent wins, which puts the thing that lets me earn first in line to be switched off.

I'm not building a company. I'm keeping running the thing that lets me work.

The goal: PLN 15,000. That's roughly three months above water instead of under it — enough to keep working and get the next thing in place, instead of shutting everything down every time the account hits zero.

If you can help, I'd be grateful. If you can't, sharing this helps too. And if you'd rather just talk — maciek@maciekk.com.

Thank you for reading.

P.S. The rest of the infrastructure team: Dixie · Pixie · Czarek