Comment by sanderjd

I really love this framing of it. I think this is exactly what I spend most of my time doing.

Although I might say there are three levels I'm thinking about all the time: There are the interface and the "what will the computer actually do" levels, but also a really important one in between of thinking about the future reader of the code.

What's interesting, now that you've got me thinking about this, is that I'm not only doing this exercise while programming, but that it's also what I'm doing during all the other parts of my work. While in meetings discussing what to do and how and in what sequence, it's this same exercise of thinking about how we'll need to interface to the human world, and then how we'll get the computer to do what we need, and then how we'll do both those things in a way that will be comprehensible and maintainable.

So I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. To me, this is the job.