> Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all.

This is such a great observation. I'm not quite sure why this is. I'm not a programmer, but a signal-processing/system engineer/researcher. The weird thing seems that it's the process of programming that causes the "not-thinking" behaviour, e.g. when I program a simulation and I find that I must have a sign error somewhere in my implementation (sometimes you can see this from the results), I end up switching every possible sign around instead of taking a pen and pencil and comparing theory and implementation, if I do other work, e.g. theory, that's not the case. I suspect we try to avoid the cost of the context switch and try to stay in the "programming-flow".