After playing a popular indi game (Kenshi) I was wondering about the very simple automation interface the game relies upon. Why not a virtual world (with interfaces attaching any external source) in which business logic agents interact through the available interfaces of the environment, and other agents. Though tbh, I imagine the entire environment as implemented in layers of YAML style schemas and profiles. So all data, whether in a datastore, active instance, streamed or serialized can be related to in the same way. An envelope with attributes and content specified by the type attribute. The only code would then be the rendering environment, and whatever these agents call for stream processing.
Sort of a gamification of automation, though what can’t be beat is dead simple account of what any one thing is doing at a given time.