In the same fashion, I update my design, architecture, and implementation documents concurrently with implementing a prototype if I need to make modifications or add complexity on the fly. They aren't for me, now. They're for the junior engineers I'm going to hand the project over to who need to be able to flesh out parts of a much larger machine.
Finally, whether or not I can read or understand my code, which I generally can, I test it anyway. I test my code not because it is unreadable (it is generally very readable), but because despite my best efforts to minimize complexity, it is generally too complex to fit inside my head, and because whether or not it fits in my head I'm not the only person working on it.