> The idea is that a programmer will work with natural language dynamically to create enough of an understanding to create a formalized specification within the programming language

I don't disagree that that is some people’s idea of the idealized process (though there are others, too.)

I disagree, though, that it is the purpose for which programming languages, as a category of tools, were invented. In fact, there were a whole bunch of tools for solving the problem of clarity of communicating expectations of sysstem behavior between humans in unconstrainted natural language invented, and that it was until fairly recently (well into the period of dominance of Agile, or at least “Agile”, methodss) the usual expectation in non-trivial programming projects that some combination of those would be used to solve that problem, and then the programmers, understanding the intent through those tools, would use programming languages to solve the problem that languages that are ideal for communicating between humans are not ideal for source languages for practical compilers or interpreters in computers.