Yes, their reasoning is different from ours, and both considerably weaker in lots of ways, and stronger in other ways.

Playing with a coding agent now, they do think through problems and make sensible decisions. It's a mess to read, of correcting itself and second guessing, and verbiage. But... It works decently well these days.

There is also reasoning happening internally - e.g. look at the steps in the J-Space paper from earlier in the year (in quite a simple model relatively speaking). That's the "reasoning process" that leads to the words, and much like if I write out my thoughts, the words help the LLM reason better.