Borrowing from mechanical/electrical etc. Limit the number of things you can build with. An example in the comments here was a gear. You make a new gear based on examples of gears that work. So whats the software equivalent of a gear? an axle, a bearing, etc.. Using OO or some ABI, you specify an object is a gear and behaves like a gear and magically you know how it does or doesnt fit together with other objects. I know this idea has been used before but im wondering if theres a well known software framework or library. We have things like the stl in cpp or built in libraries in python but im thinking of a higher level abstraction.

> if theres a well known software framework or library

Those are called data/structures and design patterns (not only the ones in the GoF book). If you have a good understanding of those and you know your data and the operation you will apply to it, it’s easy to model your data using those structures. Software are state machines specifications. Knowing how to model states and thus figuring the transitions is helpful. And there’s a lot of samples out there.