The very best devs are not always using code as a 'solution'. Also, going back to your customer (internal/external) and reviewing their 'needs' goes a long way into understanding the core issue they are facing.
Very often I've experienced requests made to devs are 'solutions' the customers think they need for their core issue (which you have not discovered yet).
A very good dev will go past that initial request and ask questions to understand the core issue. Many times the intial request does not solve the core issue, and the customer needs to be made aware of this, because it has a huge impact on the final solution and on your business productivity.
But the impossibility of getting such straight, logical answers from most civilians/customers is the best part of why Agile exists; only when they see something can most customers be clear, at least about what won't work. It's not even a question of their being vague - they will often give you flatly false statements because they've never been trained to be precise, think about edge cases, or even what intellectual honesty is.
Also known as the XY problem [1]. It's almost tragic how often the best opening question to a request is "what are you really trying to do?". The fact that it is a widely-known Stackexchange anti-pattern is pretty telling.
Very often I've experienced requests made to devs are 'solutions' the customers think they need for their core issue (which you have not discovered yet).
A very good dev will go past that initial request and ask questions to understand the core issue. Many times the intial request does not solve the core issue, and the customer needs to be made aware of this, because it has a huge impact on the final solution and on your business productivity.