The idea here can be generalized to a primitive programming construct: The magic function "wish", which can do anything you want, just give it a string description.

For example:

    wish('copy these files to this host', files, host)

You can augment this further by allowing the program to specify a return type from the wish, and magically the wish will produce the type you want. So for example:

    data = wish(Path, 'the path of the data files I need')

Of course, the wish is actually implemented by sending a request to some human user. In my "wish" library for Python http://rsyscall.org/wish/ you can have a stack of handlers for wishes, just like exception handlers. If later you want to automate some wish, you can specify a handler which intercepts certain wishes and forwards the other ones on (by wishing again, just like an exception handler can re-raise).