You have a point about not leaving with the big fragile stack inside your head. But see my example's TODO - it's really leaving after I've just resolved a lot o

You have a point about not leaving with the big fragile stack inside your head. But see my example's TODO - it's really leaving after I've just resolved a lot of tension by solving a big problem and now I'm able to restart with more of a low-level grinding task. So I guess there's really more to it than just leaving the code in broken state. I mean it's broken in that you've deliberately created a syntax error, but the next step can still be very straightforward. Sort of like a broken test, which others have mentioned is a good variant of this practice.