The details depend a bit on the audiostack of your distro, but they all have a cli program with which you can change inputs/outputs and volume; e.g. pactl for pulseaudio and wpctl for wireplumber.
You’ll need a mechanism to find your triggers (I create a firefox tab with youtube/spotify, I have a music player active) and then you can act on it.
Detecting voice in an audiostream is probably technically possible, but that sounds pretty hard to setup.
You can also set up a wireguard VPN to run VNC over, that might be easier instead of using SSH tunnels.
Python development shouldn’t be that hard I think. You can just drop a shell.nix that imports your pyproject.toml and then you can run nix develop and have all your dependencies installed seamlessly with poetry2nix.
I’m using neovim so I can’t really help you with vscode, sorry.
Have you tried Erasing your darlings with NixOS?
To expand a little on @Laser ‘s point 2:
In bash (and other programming languages) # is used at the start of the line to notate comments.
When writing percentages, you write the symbol after the number, e.g. 50%
That’s how I keep them apart, lol
Theres a section in the bash manual with these and a whole bunch of more expansion tricks.
One I find useful is
echo "${myvar@A}"
Yes, a quick web search later I haven’t found a readymade solution.
Setting the volume for specific outputs is not very hard, so maybe a middleground solution is to have two shortcuts. One for “game mode” and one for “music mode” or whatever.