[leesalminen]

Same here! Sometimes I’ve spent weeks thinking through a problem fully, talking to everyone involved (including myself) only to code whatever it was in a couple hours. It’s amazing what our brains can process subconsciously.

[swader999]

Related to this, I typically advocate for the daily stand-up close to mid day so that more work gets time to "sleep on it" and then a chance to add any insights that came to you during the off time. I seem to do better features and code over two work sessions than in one long continuous day.

[username90]

You don't think that coding a prototype in a few hours before talking to people would let them better answer your questions and help reduce that time to a few days instead of weeks? Coding is a very versatile tool and can be used to greatly improve communication.

[tsimionescu]

If it's a very specific problem and you have a candidate solution already known, sure. If it's a vague problem or if you just don't know how to solve it, a prototype would do much less, and is probably a waste of time.

In particular, architectural discussions benefit pretty little from prototyping in the initial phases. If you want to decide if your next system should be microservice based or monolithic, prototyping won't do much.

Similarly, if the basic requirements are not yet understood, asking questions about them is more efficient than implementing a version of possible requirements and asking others to correct it.