I wholeheartedly agree. Flowcharts etc. are a diminishing return in terms of projects size (not physical lines of code, but conceptual size); the smaller the projects, the more of a waste of time it all is. Unless you're in a team. That's a different game and I won't get into that because I sucked when working in a team and because we're talking home-projects -- the best kind. I like to just template everything for each individual piece -- not necessarily even function, just piece. And I say "function" because I prefer working procedurally. I find OO wastes lots of time on design and I'm one of those people who gets lost in design as it is (if it's a big project, I see the benefits of OO, but mainly because it makes abstracting things easier which makes overhauling large chunks of code easier, otherwise for home-projects, I'd avoid OO and be laughed at by the new kiddies). Anyway, once the actual functions are all templated, the answers to my design questions have come during the templating due to obvious mistakes being highlisted during the process. So, now that I have a skeleton that "works" in theory, I'll start filling each function with stuff, testing it, moving on, testing... and eventually everything works. Then comes the putting things together. It'd start off as just results sent to stdout, but eventually the graphics would tentatively be added (if applicable)... This only relates to coding an app/game/etc. For small utilities and scripts, I work entirely organically because I know what I want to be done and how.
As for tools, I hate IDEs, I dislike these modern tools that ship with engines where you create "nodes" and this magically creates half the code for you. I can't visually code. I need to just sit and write and run and repeat until it works. Sorry, old-fashioned, not all fancy, cool, and sleek like the modern gen.
On a side-note: I think I'm a little disillusioned with coding now. I wanted to be a big indie game dev and I lost an entire RPG during my Great Data Loss. I hadn't actually coded it, but I'd written the plot, designed the maps, weapons, items, enemies, levelling systems unique to each character, hidden shit, some music... Man, I'd even written a test game to familiarise myself with the SDK I was going to use. It eats at me because I keep thinking, "if I'd just dived in, I'd have finished my RPG!" even though I know that test game took like a 10th of the time the RPG would have. Anyway, I haven't seriously coded in years. I write utilities for myself, mostly just bash scripts (which doesn't really count) and a few small utils in C, like my own "password manager" (it's a lot more that that, but still) coz I don't trust anyone else's. I was planning on writing a public version, coz it's actually quite useful, I run it on my PC, laptop, and phone, but I never got around to it coz during my disillusionment, I realised I actually don't like coding (anymore?) so much as the results it brings. I think 11yo me fell in love with a novelty. Or maybe I just never got over losing all that work and I subconsciously associate coding with that.
