Curious as to why you think documenting everything from the start is counterproductive. Are you opposed to documenting everything or documenting from the start, and why?
I mean, I hate writing documentation, but as someone who has had to come back to code I've written months prior (and I was the only one to work on the project), let alone code someone else wrote, I'm incredibly grateful when I look at old code that's actually documented. Plus I feel that writing a couple lines of documentation helps me figure out exactly what I want the code to do.