Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything the ai says, or review every step of the implementation. It’s extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt. Recently, my PM shared a nigh-on incompressible hand-scribbled diagram on Slack (which, in fairness, was more or less a joke). I uploaded it to Gemini with the prompt "WTF does this diagram mean?". Even without a shred of context, it figured out that it was some kind of product feature matrix and produced a perfect three paragraph summary.
I've never really seen the value in the planning phase as you're free to just throw away whatever the AI produces and try again with a different prompt. That said, I don't pay for my tokens at work. Is planning perhaps useful as a way of reducing total token usage?
This could simply be a matter of style however.