It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.
I like to chat with Claude about how to approach a given problem, bring in extra context, etc, before even really drafting up a plan, while other people dive into implementation immediately and go on wild goose chases.
90% of the time we end up in the same place in roughly the same amount of time, and there are obviously tradeoffs to spending more time planning vs implementing. I'm oversimplifying as well.
Until now, the actual act of writing code: terminology, syntax, etc. was a significant hurdle, and that underlying mindset was a very useful, but missing in a surprisingly large number of developers, skill.
Now with LLMs doing the work of "translate this into code," increasingly the only thing that matters is that exact ability. And developers that don't have it or can't develop it won't be developers for long.