The sciencey side of this is that writing stuff down boosts memory, retention and learning, even if you immediately throw away what you wrote.

Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...

Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.

I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.

Handwriting does aid retention though.