YES YES YES!! I so wish that we could go back in time and never, ever have even suggested anything other that what you say here. AI doesn't do it for you. It does it with you.
You have to figure out what you want before the AI codes. The thinking BEFORE is the entire game.
Though I will also say that I use Claude for working out designs a lot. Literally hours sometimes with long periods of me thinking it through.
And I still get a ton more done and often use tech that I would never have approached before these glory days.
The hours of design thinking with Claude is exactly it. That's the part nobody talks about because it isn't 'sexy' and doesn't make for a good demo or tweet. But it's the secret sauce IMO.
This. Code generation is cheap, so you can rapidly explore the space and figure out the architecture that best suits the problem. From there, I start fresh and pseudocode the basic pattern I want and have Claude fill in the gaps.