Using LLMs for code archaeology is pretty fun.
I stumbled across this blog entry from 2003 today, in which I had gotten briefly excited about ColdFusion and implemented an experimental PHP template engine that used XML tags to achieve a similar effect:
<h1>%title%</h1> <sql id="recent"> select title from entries order by added desc limit 0, %limit% </sql> <ul> <output sql="recent"> <li>%title%</li> </output> </ul>
I'd completely forgotten about this, and in scanning through the PHP it looked like it had extra features that I hadn't described in the post.
So... I fed my 22 year old TemplateParser.class.php file into Claude and prompted:
Write detailed markdown documentation for this template language
Here's the resulting documentation. It's pretty good, but the highlight was the Claude transcript which concluded:
This appears to be a custom template system from the mid-2000s era, designed to separate presentation logic from PHP code while maintaining database connectivity for dynamic content generation.
Mid-2000s era indeed!