I believe they're saying that the checkboxes are window dressing, not an accurate reflection of what the LLM has done.

To some extent, I could agree with that idea. One purpose of that process is to match the impedance between the problem, and human cognition. But that presumes problem solving inherently requires human cognition, which is false; that's just the tool that we have for problem solving. When the problem-solving method matches the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of the problem solvers, they do have a certain sensation of having an upper hand over the problem. Part of that comes from the chunking/division allowing the problem solvers to more easily talk about the problem; have conversations and narratives around it. The ability to spin coherent narratives feels like rigor.

I'm saying that's not what the stupid bot is actually doing, it's what anthropic added to the TUI to make you feel good in your feelies about what the bot is actually doing (spamming).

Edit: I'll give you another example that I realized because someone pointed it out here: when the stupid bot tells you why it fucked up, it doesn't actually understand anything about itself - it's just generating the most likely response given the enormous amount of pontification on the internet about this very subject...