Typically I find a novel problem domain requires roughly about 3 attempts from scratch to get a maintainable longer-term solution. However, that still requires

Typically I find a novel problem domain requires roughly about 3 attempts from scratch to get a maintainable longer-term solution. However, that still requires having some idea in mind to try before just writing code. Of course you might also do some prototyping on certain subparts of the problem but there’s only so much of that that can be done and you’re still trying out what expressing high level ideas looks like / how it works. I don’t think there’s anything where the first step is writing code. It’s like saying the first step of solving a math problem is writing down equations.