Let me rephrase.

I know brilliant people who took up knitting to keep their hands busy while they think over their difficult problems. But that only works if you can knit in your work hours. Sadly, despite clearly improving the productivity of these people, this is a fireable offense in many jobs.

I'm not saying that the only way to think through a hard problem is to work on boilerplate. If you are in a workplace where you can knit, or play table soccer, by all means, and if these help you, by all means, go for it.

What I'm thinking out loud is that if we're dedicating 100% of our time to the hard problems, we'll hit a snag, and that boilerplate may (accidentally) serve as the padding that makes sure we're not at these 100%.

That being said, I'm not going to claim this as a certainty, just an idea.

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bdcravens 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't disagree, but I find a better use of my time is writing. Not code, but essentially a work journal. It's not big thoughts, it's bullet points. It's not documentation, but more of a open mind map: what's been done, what needs to be done, questions that inevitably pop up, etc. I use Obsidian for this, but if I write much more than what would go on a few post-it notes, it's too much.

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saulpw 3 days ago | parent [-]

Writing and coding use different parts of the brain. Writing is for creating a model to communicate about human things, and coding is for creating a model for communicating about computer things.

	▲	bdcravens 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but we've all had one of those "ah-ha!" moments when we took ourselves out of the code. I feel like putting yourself in a position when you're thinking big picture is far more useful than hand-coding a routes file or adding validation to a model file.