"Higher level" implies acceptance of geometric structure. You place tokens like a Chomsky diagrams at each step up and down, where you should see parameters to transform geometry of the structure.
My team works "above" the contrived state management of software workers to more efficiently sync memory matrix to display matrix. LLMs are a form of compression [1]. My team is working on compressing them further into sets of points that make up each glyph and functions to recreate them.
Electromagnetic geometry transforms hardcoded[2] into hardware so reduce energy use of all the outdated string mangling of software dev as most know it.
What's higher level, relative to our machines, than design and implementation of the machine?
DnD dungeon master versus WOTC game designer.
Notice outside how there are no words and philosophy? Just color gradient and geometry?
Notice inside the human body no philosophy or words?
Language is not intelligence it's an emergent phenomena of geometry created by fundamental forces of physics organizing matter at various speeds relative to light.
You've read too much into an ultimately arbitrary statement meant to invoked a subtext, a subtle emotion context. You think of language as Legos, when it is music to feel.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2987/1/...