My PhD supervisor used to say: "one week of programming easily saves an hour of thinking"
I've been in meetings that lasted for days and which were all ultimately invalidated by actually writing matching code which immediately made all the issues in the lines of thought glaring and obvious.
One thing I have found programming helpful for in the thought process, though, is to uncover things that one thinks one has already thought through fully, but where there are gaps of detail one has leapt across without even noticing. Programming tends to reveal those.
Agree. As a hobbyist coder I try where possible to do some conceptual thinking by writing out in English my high-level solution approach, and then start coding, fully expecting to uncover some details I hadn't anticipated in advance. I try to avoid diving right in with a hack. But sometimes I find it useful to start with a quick-and-dirty implementation, especially if I'm learning a new tool or language.
This phrase only applies when the "idea" is CC related.
For all other subjects - and their intersection with CC - programming is secondary.
Whenever I got the time to first sketch the idea I become much more assertive when coding it.