In response to your edit, you should check out Terry tao's chat gpt logs about the recent Jacobian result. The models are smart enough to brute force some things, but can cut to the meat much faster with good prompting
in my head, the comparison is the multi-paragraph prompts (borderline essays) i would read in various communities on reddit and similar forums, that people (often self-proclaimed "prompt engineers") said were "required" to get good output. or some of the prompts ive read in various logs that are like a thousand words of setup.
even looking back at the first prompts i was sending when i started to use chatgpt were (in hindsight) crazy long and full of unnecessary guidance/caveats/"ignore xyz"/etc.
I can paste entire failure logs with the word "why" lowercase, no question mark, and get into a productive chat session where it significantly speeds up the bug trace. I will paste the text from a groomed ticket with no editing or additional instructions into the chat and then give it a bit of feedback on the plan for a couple iterations.
I feel so vindicated in never spending time learning prompting as a specific skill, it really just took a couple more years and the models are really easy to interact with with simple natural language.
Not sure when you started. However: I would never judge the necessity of details provided 2 or 3 years ago based on results that the current models give.