Simon Willison’s Weblog

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!

# 1st July 2025, 7:57 pm / claude, coldfusion, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, php, generative-ai, projects