Oof. You’re not totally wrong. I’ve parsed XML with XSDs since the days of Java. I looked at the 100 line Ruby implementation of parsing these files and thought “ack. (Not ACK) why do I need all of this?!”

Well it has a data loader, and hits APIs with retry logic, and has a CLI that can take arguments to run data downloads that can resume on fail, and yeah it parses the stupid XML with a “chapeau” tag - did you know that is French for hat? There is a tag that is the “hat” for a section and it is just like another title basically. So yeah, I would’ve had to learn all of that. But it also tests all of these things with actual tests. And the adversary complains if you write a test that isn’t actually testing anything meaningful. And if I needed to, I could reason about the architecture by reading the architecture design documents, which I have done at least a little bit and they are pretty nice, I have to admit.

Anyways - it’s a next step in the evolution of the laws in GitHub which is actually interesting to see them change and imagine what we can do with more data overlayed. Sadly the other repos were not maintained so this is the latest laws and you can view the diff from one Congress to another. Or you can git blame one of the files and see how old certain sections are. The data we have right now only goes back to 2013.

A chapeau is not "just like another title basically". It's a lead-in, a phrase which acts as the grammatical start of a sentence which the following subsections finish. For instance, the text in the first paragraph of 18 U.S.C § 3632(a) which ends in an em-dash is a chapeau. Taking pride in work you have not done and not bothered to understand is perplexing.