[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.