I remember seeing a programming tutorial that used this approach as well fairly early in my software engineering education. I want to say it was part of the SICP MIT course but I could be confusing it with something else.

It was pitched as something like "wishful thinking programming" IIRC. First you write the highest-level "business logic" code that you want to write with made-up constructs that have no implementation, then only once you've established that it feels good to write code using those constructs do you implement them.

I remember this also being the same approach that was used in a CPU-building course I took (NAND 2 Tetris): start with the instruction set, then implement it.