Depends on your goal. Chording technique is superior when typing words contained in the dictionary. Meaning that typing some rarely used word required typing it multiple times to "confirm".
Writing code does not suite well for this, since coding with completion contains much more punctuation than plain text.
Instead, check out ergonomic mechanical keyboards: low-profile, split, with columnar stagger, preferrably with 36 or less keys. Uncommon keys are behind a modifier key that acts as a normal key when pressed, but as a layer when held (called modtap).
Also you can experiment with non-qwerty layouts, but IME it gives much less benefit than having a layered layout of physical keys.
More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/
Non-qwerty seems to me to be one of the biggest wastes of time we’ve come up with in search of productivity. The time spent learning it could be spent learning vi, learning Haskell, learning to shoot hoops or learning the guitar. Pretty much all of those would benefit you more.
For some it's not about productivity, but about getting a few more years out of your fragile body before RSI ends your career.
> preferrably with 36 or less keys.
I think it's worth emphasising that these small keyboards bring the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands resting on home row.
They aim to increase comfort by reducing hand movement, and stretching / use of the pinky fingers. This benefit comes at the cost of a (slightly) more complex keymap.
The key thing isn't "less than 60 keys", it's "two or more thumb keys on each hand".
Some of these ergonomic keyboards opt for more than 34-36 keys. (e.g. the Moonlander is relatively popular).
Couldn’t you just create new chords that represent the most commonly typed code components?
Yes, but people who use an IDE will already have support for “code snippets” and completions, so you need to look for a different advantage to create.
Good point - I bet completions are much quicker in practice than a chord for commonly used snippets. At least the number of chords a normal human can remember!
Same reason voice recognition isn't good for code.
AFIAK all writing-compression methods come down to optimizing for the common--and so much of what we do is the uncommon. We need lots of keys.