I've been a skeptic, but now that I'm getting into using LLMs, I'm finding being very descriptive and laying down my thoughts, preferences, assumptions, etc, to help greatly.

I suppose a year ago we were talking about prompt engineers, so it's partly about being good at describing problems.

One trick to get out of this scenario where you're writing a ton is to ask the model to interview until we're in alignment on what is being built. Claude and open code both have an AskUserQuestionTool which is really nice for this and cuts down on explanation a lot. It becomes an iterative interview and clarifies my thinking significantly.