I think that one way of expressing it, but the truth is more that, once an action is "hard-wired", we only have to think "minimally", about said action.
If we didn't think about it at all, there would be, no action.
That's not quite accurate. You can, in fact, do a number of activities without conscious thought. The best descriptive example is sleep-walking.
The terms for consciousness are poorly defined so people tend to have a hard time discussing these topics.
An insect senses its environment but it has no awareness. It's responses are mostly hardwired. Many insects simply react to their environment wherever they happen to be. However, there are insects with memory and at least some capacity to learn. There are a few that have abstraction. The best example I can think of is the honeybee.
Fish do show awareness. I suppose this is related to establishing a territory. I define awareness as having an abstract model of your environment in relation to yourself. Crocodiles show awareness. Cuttlefish also show awareness.
Consciousness is tougher. This involves the ability to construct new abstract models. Octopus are right on the edge of this with only a tiny ability to problem solve. Water monitors can do this. The ability to create abstract models is difficult because you have to have inhibition systems to counter them otherwise your behavior becomes erratic. It is possible that some fish have some problem solving ability. Trigger Fish seem to be pretty clever so they are probably at least as conscious as octopus.
When people sleep-walk, they have obvious awareness of their environment, however, they don't exhibit conscious problem-solving. Sleep-walkers do what is familiar, so these would be things that have become hard-wired through learning.
People don't usually understand how limited human consciousness is. Most of the brain is organized for automatic pattern matching. Both hemispheres of your brain are aware but only one of them is conscious. You could say that you are aware in a subconscious fashion of these patterns (the same as most fish are aware) but most go unnoticed by your conscious mind. That's the way it should be. However, that does cause problems. For example, if you take medication everyday then this becomes so routine that you create no new memory patterns from it. It then becomes impossible to remember if you took the medication. This is why people use pill organizers. It's also why pilots manually read through a check list instead of doing it by memory.
