Humans first start with recognizing the problem, then search through their list of abilities to find the best skill for solving it, thus "autocomplete" their inner shell's commandline, before they start execution, to stay with that picture. Common AIs today are not much different from this, especially with reasoning-modes.

> you're not throwing guesses until something statistically likely to be correct sticks.

What do you mean? That's exactly how many humans are operating with unknown situations/topics. If you don't know, just throw punches and look what works. Of course, not everyone is ignorant enough to be vocal about this in every situation.