I have a dev log in org mode. Any thoughts about what I'm working on go there. Including TODOs. It's always open, so there is no open/save/close process.

Of course, I have to update it. But it's just one more file that gets updated. It's not onerous.

Plus, I'm not destroying documentation about my development process. I have used this method since I started developing professionally 15 years ago. I can go back over a decade and look into why I did certain things for a piece of code and how I decided to break the work apart.