For me, it depends on the problem being solved. If the problem is in a space that we know what the solution 'should' look like, getting as much of that down in

For me, it depends on the problem being solved. If the problem is in a space that we know what the solution 'should' look like, getting as much of that down in the most abstract sense is something I like to do. However that design is only a -proposed- solution, and of course subject to all sorts of changes. But where things are murky in a design, yeah, sometimes the easiest thing to do is code it out. In either case, (up to date) diagrams of data flows are one's friend in any distributed system.