> The first is the articulation of a process by which an intent gets actualized into an automation. The second is the translation of that intent into instructions that a machine can follow.

IMO this pattern fails on non-trivial problems because you don't know how the intent can be actualized into automation without doing a lot of the mechanical conversion first to figure out how the intent maps to the automation. This mapping is the engineering. If you can map the intent to actualization without doing it, then this is a solved problem in engineering and be usable by non-engineers. Relating this to your simile, it is more like a developer vs. an architect where the developer uses pre-designed building vs. the architect which needs to design a new building to meet a certain set of design requirements.