[eaglefield]

I think that's an overly uncharitable read on this approach. Lots of tasks that have difficult thoughts, that need to be thought before they can be completed, also have phases in which work just has to be done. I'm in the middle of collaborating on an article for submission to a physics journal. I wouldn't term it filler work, but most of the complex thoughts on the problem have been thought through and the work right now is creating a coherent story that goes over our results. An outline method would work fine for this part of the project.

As for the spy novel, i think the outlining is actually quite similar to how Sylvester Stallone described his writing process[0]. You wouldn't fill the outline with generic beats, you would put in your basic plan for the story.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xqfkVNwEU

[gizmo]

It sounds like we are mostly in agreement, actually. Mathematicians don't start by creating an outline of a paper they have to write. They start by proving a theorem of some kind -- that's the part that involves thinking hard -- and only after they have something worth publishing does it make sense to think in terms of an outline. Proving the theorem take take a mathematician months (or a lifetime). Writing the paper takes an afternoon.

It's the same for software. By time time you understand the problem well enough that you can write down a list of things to be done you're already way past the "thinking hard" stage.

Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for rocky in 3 days. He could do this because he had already figured out the concepts, the theme, the characters and their personalities way ahead of time. He had worked on it in his head for years. By the time he started typing 90% of the work was already done. Nothing Stallone wrote later in his career was as good as his original rocky script.