I agree. I actually think it's the single most important skill for beginner to intermediate programmers. Not structuring the code or managing complex abstractio

I agree. I actually think it's the single most important skill for beginner to intermediate programmers. Not structuring the code or managing complex abstraction, just having a reliable mental model of the program and the environment. I've often seen beginners struggle because they get so used to the compiler or the (often manual) tests catching errors that they just try things "to see if they work" without understanding what they're trying. But they don't consider two important questions: "what do you want to happen?" and "what do you expect to happen?". If you can answer both of those, you can figure out whether your code will work before you write it. In many cases when programmers struggle it's because they don't know the answer to one or both. They're left just trying stuff until something works, but there's a lot more things that don't work than things that do, and a lot more bad solutions than good ones.