Is the pre-build phase the most underrated problem in software development?

Everyone talks about how fast AI can write code now. Nobody talks about the three weeks before the first line of code is written.

Requirements gathering. Discovery calls. Proposal creation. Architecture planning. UI/UX design. Technical documentation. Scope estimation.

All of it happens before anything is actually built. And all of it is largely repetitive work that

senior people are overqualified to be doing manually.

We built 8080.AI partly to solve this. Our agents don't just write code. They plan before they build. The System Architect designs the architecture. The Project Manager decomposes tasks. The pipeline connects planning directly to execution. But I'm curious what others are seeing.

For teams building software today, where does the most time actually get lost? In the build or in everything that happens before it?