100% this. I do some work where frontier LLMs really are quite bad on a first pass... yet with what I consider a basically silly agent architecture which sort of amounts to "do this three ways, check, revise, choose the best, rethink, check, check, revise ......" I get to remarkably good results. It was through this process I realized.... humans do this, on the fly, without thinking.

I end up spending a lot on inference, it's incredibly slow, and the architecture really does seem like overkill at first glance. But it works magic.