Agree, and for me I feel like I often have more implicit intentions than I write in a prompt. A plan helps me verify whether an agent gets these right or not. Plus, it highlights tradeoffs I might've not thought about. Removing both feels like lowering a quality bar.

On the other hand, for a low effort hobby project: just do the thing.

It is absolutely true that Opus 5.5 just ‘gets it’ far more often than gpt-5.6-sol, which is more like an idiot savant. It can nearly always do what you ask it to, but that might not be what you want.

Yer, it’s probably best to face reality and understand that for actual software engineering / complex coding work - Anthropic models are way ahead of OpenAIs…