Whoever invented Rexx is a god. I wrote a program to renumber and indent Fortran programs in Rexx, and it actually worked. Outstanding documentation; IBM was THE standard for docs back in the '80s.

They are still a standard for Docs, if you look at z/OS docs today, they put all Linux distro and even Kernel docs to shame to be perfectly honest.

Organized PDFs of the order of a thousand pages for literally every subsystem or additional program etc. Over a hundred PDFs in total. Probably 100k+ pages of raw docs.

And that's not even including the Principles of Operations (the mainframe s390x ISA reference), and is just the docs for ONE of the several Mainframe operating systems.

Mike Cowlishaw. He also created the Java decimal math, and the IEEE DECIMAL floating point.

If you can suppress your gag reflex, M4 can do some of what you want. sinclude(...) will include a file and be silent in case of failure. I did something like this for user-login history because I couldn't use PHP or Perl:

    me% cat index.m4
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`byuser.m4')dnl
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`bydate.m4')dnl
            </ul>
          </ul>
    sinclude(`footer.m4')dnl
      </body>
    </html>

    me% cat byuser.m4
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>

    me% cat bydate.m4
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>

    me% cat footer.m4
    <p><em>Last update: syscmd(`date | tr -d "\n"')</em>

    me% m4 index.m4 > index.htm

    me% cat index.htm
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>
            </ul>
          </ul>
    <p><em>Last update: Mon Oct 12 03:08:32 EDT 2026</em>
      </body>
    </html>

1. Price tracking over time.

2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.

Lovely.

+1. One of my favorite quotes:

No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley

> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this

Shoot me now.

> Shoot me now.

I'm sorry, I can't generate that because the request violates our content policies.

Quietly

If they can't justify why this is a bug, and why it's worth your time to fix this as opposed to something else, you should be able to revoke their permission to touch your backlog.

This is perfect.

Since AI makes it easier for incompetent people to look smart, AI can help us expose those people for what they are.

By checking the diffs carefully, you're showing how to use an LLM to add value instead of creating a 17000-line PR that nobody with any sense will read.

LLMs are really good at making it harder to ignore ignorant people, and you've demonstrated that you're NOT part of the problem.

This is right on the money. It's not that we have way more bad engineers than before; it's that the damage they do is out of all proportion to their numbers.