One of the best ways to expand an incremental game’s gameplay is to gradually automate one layer, while introducing new mechanics in a higher layer. So one’s focus for optimization gradually shifts from older and better-understood mechanics to a higher level, where the gameplay is to manipulate the lower layer’s mechanics to make it run as quickly as a basic action did at the start.

a couple years ago a friend of mine got into botting Diablo II, which seemed like a whole game in itself, which made me think, how neat would that be, a game where you start off doing regular gameplay stuff, and then you eventually automate/optimize that gameplay at increasingly more meta levels of play. still think there's something to that idea...

That sounds like the concept of Factorio: the abstraction level we play at rises with time. Most of the achievements are about skipping manual labor at various points in time.

Did Factorio have blueprints? That seemed like one of the greatest advances in Dyson Sphere Program, when you could lay down a whole factory unit at once; emphasised the move to greater levels of abstraction.

Mind you, I'd have liked a lite version that reduced the tech tree by maybe a third but still enabled you to get all the advancements without devoting your whole life to it ;o)

Factorio is unplayable without blueprints. It's such an integral part of the game that it's like asking if Quake has guns.

Factorio had blueprints wayyyyy before DSP.

Not only that (and I can't tell if that's what you meant originally), but Factorio had blueprints _before Dyson Space Program came out_.

There are a few games where the point is basically to write a bot to play for you. Off the top of my head are Screeps and Adventure Land

All factory and automation games build on that concept. It's a huge genre with a lot of good titles.

ComputerCraft/EduCraft which was a Minecraft mod with Lua programmable robots that you could craft and set to work for you, gradually. Sounds similar to what you're going for here.

I wonder what other examples there are?

You should absolutely not check out bitburner then if you cannot afford a distraction, especially if you like programming and green crt hacker aesthetic

well... shit.