How to say "I understand how to do something conceptually, but not concretely?" [closed]

As a programmer a situation comes up frequently, where I 'conceptually' know what I need to do, and I can explain the thing from a 'high level' - but I don't know exactly what to do.

Like, I know that "I need to inject a configuration into a project" but I don't know what files to change to make that configuration inject.

I haven't figured out a way to nicely express this notion, so I often find myself stumbling around saying things that don't make sense: "I know what to do, but I don't know exactly what to do". "So, you don't know?", "No, I know how kind of, but not exactly".

This is the difference between theory, which are the conceptual steps you need to take, and practice, which is the actual implementation of those steps.

If someone asks if you know how to solve a problem, you could respond, "I understand the solution in theory, but don't know how to implement it in practice."

For example, you might understand all the equations and pseudocode needed to implement an algorithm (the theory), but if you're working in a new programming language/environment, you might be unable to write a program that would actually run (the practice).

You could use the phrase "in principle" about which Lexico (Oxford Dictionaries) says

in principle
PHRASE

1 As a general idea or plan, although the details are not yet established.
The plan was accepted in principle but the details for it were not.

1.1 Used to indicate that although something is theoretically possible, in reality it may not actually happen.
This all seemed a great idea in principle but of course the numbers don't work.

So you can say

I understand how to do this in principle but I have yet to work out the detail.