that's my assessment too. there's even a phenomenon I've observed both in others and myself, when thrust into a new field and given a task to complete, we do it to the best of our ability, which is often sod all. so we ape the things we've heard others say, roughly following the right chain of reasoning by luck, and then suddenly say something that in hind sight, with proper training, we realise was incredibly stupid. we autocomplete and then update with rlfh.

we also have a ton of heuristics that trigger a closer look and loading of specific formal reasoning, but by and large, most of our thought process is just auto complete.