What if you could reverse a template engine?

I've been building software for over 20 years across banking, healthcare, financial SaaS, and media. At Stuff, one of New Zealand's largest news platforms, I worked on systems that consumed and produced structured content at scale. In banking and healthcare, I dealt with legacy systems that predate REST APIs entirely: fixed-format financial reports, statement exports, internal tools that print structured text to stdout because that was the interface in 2003 and nobody has touched it since. Back