Software code generation from the (operational) semantics - reference request for automatic programming
I haven't seen anything on this but the closest I could find is Evolving Algebras:


Evolving Algebras: An Attempt to Discover Semantics
Evolving Algebras: Mini-Course
Communicating Evolving Algebras


In that mini course there are several papers outlining different aspects and applications of the Evolving Algebra. From one of them:


  In 1988 Yuri Gurevich has discovered the notion of evolving algebra in an attempt
  to sharpen Turing's thesis by complexity theoretic considerations (see
  [22]). Through numerous case studies (see [4] for an annotated list which is
  complete up to 1994) it has become clear since then that using the notion of
  evolving algebras one can develop a powerful and elegant specication methodology
  which has a huge yet unexplored potential for industrial applications. In
  this report we are going to explain the basic concepts of this approach to the design
  and analysis of complex systems and illustrate its salient features through
  a challenging example from real life.


They also talk about successive refinement and hierarchical modeling.

Maybe if you could describe more on what you're trying to accomplish with the code generation part that would be helpful. It sounds like you are wondering about generating/forming a verified program from cognitive reasoning somehow, automatically generating the operational semantics. I haven't seen anything on that.