You can inject a hint into the query, forcing it to use a plan that would not otherwise be used, for example. Although, fixing a plan through a baseline is way cleaner. Mostly, I just meant that as an extreme example of something you can do, not something you should do. And yes, the only reason to re-write the query is when the query itself is bad in that it asks for unnecessary data or misses a join column. Admittedly, that's an extremely dirty and dangerous thing to do, as it uncouples app from db, but it is possible.

ps fighting the optimizer is the worst

Also, the problem with automatic indexing is that it only gets you so far, and any index can, in theory, mess up another query that is perfectly fine. Optimizers aren't omniscient. In addition, there are other knobs in the database, which affect performance. I suppose, a wider approach than just looking at indexes would be more successful. Like Ottertune, for example.

The problem for me was that distraction was still one alt+tab away. Ultimately, what worked for me best was writing in very boring and rather inconvenient conditions. Waiting at a car wash, or in a car shop worked best.

Without patching of pulseaudio, microphone on a bluetooth headset doesn't work anyway. I'd take not snappy but working any day, really. Maybe in Pulseaudio 14 this will get resolved, there are a couple of proposals/drafts already.