I mean it's always a bit of a middle ground isn't it? I'm not suggesting that you should literally just sit down at a keyboard and blindly start typing - of course you want to have at least some concept of how you want to approach the problem.

My point is more that coding itself is an excellent tool for probing for solutions. In many cases I think "software design" is over valued, and time spent prototyping is often more valuable than time spent thinking though the problem if you want to arrive at a high quality answer.