To give another data point I don't remember one time during my phd where hours of thinking didn't crumble immediately after starting to write code to validate i

To give another data point I don't remember one time during my phd where hours of thinking didn't crumble immediately after starting to write code to validate it (or did survive to live to this day if the line of thought was indeed valid). I've been in meetings that lasted for days and which were all ultimately invalidated by actually writing matching code which immediately made all the issues in the lines of thought glaring and obvious.