Yes, writing has always generally been great practice for thinking clearly. It's a shame it isn't more common in the industry⸺I do believe that the norm of lack of practice in it is one of the reasons why we have to deal with so much bullshit code.

The "hammock time thinking" is exactly what a lot of programmers should be doing in the first place⸺you absorb the cost of planning upfront instead of the larger costs of patching up later, but somehow the dominant culture has been to treat thoughtful coding with derision.

It's a real shame that AI beat human programmers at the game of thinking, and perhaps that's a good reason to automate us all out of our jobs.