Can you describe how you work in this higher level? Sounds like scratches a similar itch that traditional programming offers.

Sure; for reference most of what I end up doing is concurrent and distributed systems, so that's more or less what I focus on. I don't know if this stuff translates to other domains.

Basically, when I have an idea for a project, I usually start drawing a diagram for how I think things should work. I usually draw it with draw.io first because it's easy and quick. After that, I usually translate this to Mermaid, primarily just to have a second draft, but also because having a text-based system makes it easy to copy and paste around, and that kind of stuff tends to translates well to state-machine based stuff that most distributed systems tend to morph into.

If what I'm working on is relatively simple, I feed the mermaid code into Claude or Codex, give it some surrounding context text about what I want, and get it to hack away.

For more complicated stuff, especially if I want to be more clever with concurrency, I will take my Mermaid diagram and manually convert it to TLA+. If I get stuck with the TLA+ translation, I will sometimes ask Claude for a bit of help but even then I almost always write 90+% of the TLA+ spec by hand.

After that it's basically the same. I feed the TLA+ spec, and provide context to it as well (e.g. how to translate a manual TLA+ mutex or channel implementation to whatever the language has built in).

Since I focus very heavily on the implementation, Claude and Codex generally don't have a huge issue with doing a one-to-one implementation.