Without that process, those ideas remain an amorphous cloud, that as far as you’re concerned, are perfect.

This is absolutely not the case. My first startup was an attempt to build requirements management software for small teams. I am acutely aware that there is a step between "an idea" and "some code" where you have to turn the idea into something cohesive and structured that you can then turn into language a computer can understand. The bit in the middle where you write down what the software needs to do in human language is the important part of the process - you will throw the code away by deleting it, refactoring it, improving it, etc. What the code needs to do doesn't change anywhere near as fast.

Any sufficiently experienced developer who's been through the fun of working on an application that's been in production for more than a decade where the only way to know what it does is by reading the code will attest to the fact that the code is not the important part of software development. What the code is supposed to do is more important, and the code can't tell you that.