> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger.

In my now ~35 years of programming, I've found reaching for the notebook often saves me from needing to rely on a debugger unless it's code I inherited and didn't write myself. Even then, though, mapping it out on paper and using my pseudocode-shorthand to describe what the program does and what it intends to do is often faster than dealing with a debugger for anything but trivial bugs.

This is exactly my thought. Be it pen and paper or digital, writing out what your software needs to do and how it will do it saves an immense amount of time debugging or throwing things at the wall. I’m shocked at some of the responses here; there is a qualitative difference in the development experience when you spend the time designing (I also frequently do this by hand, but it doesn’t have to be) before implementing anything vs. opening an IDE and hammering something out.

I’d go further to say that software development isn’t about writing code, it’s about designing and understanding programs. Code is an implementation detail, the understanding is what is crucial.

> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison

What kind of code do you work on?

I find notebooks useful all the time, but I write in C for embedded systems, so a lot of what I do involves setting up data structures, memory layout, etc.

I do/done a little bit of everything. Backend Java, mobile ObjC (iOS) and Java (Android). Spent 2 years as a firmware dev on NRF platform so very familiar with spending time on data structures and byte alignment. I’ve also spend 4 years doing TS/JS back in the early Angular days.

Everyone’s different I guess, but for me I’ve never really reached much for a notebook. I just start writing code, refactor as needed, and rely on tooling from debugger/IDE/devtools when and where applicable.