No, that's not how it works, you can't patent a specific technology that's already been invented, what you do is wait for a new technology to be invented and then patent doing some obvious thing with the new technology.

Like, a good patent today would be: "Using a computer text prediction engine to automatically review and approve code."

It probably would have been pretty smart to skim through all the hacker news threads after ChatGpt came out patenting every other comment.

You could apply for that patent but I would expect it to be rejected due to prior art i.e. someone came up with it before you. Even if it was accepted, if you tried to enforce it, it'd definitely be challenged on prior art and you would very likely lose because it wouldn't be hard to prove you went the first.

Now, why this particular patent exists, and seems so general, is also likely related to prior art. What could be patented for software was a bit murky until the late 1990's when it was established that business methods implemented in software were allowed. This led to a large flood of patents in that space.

One of the issues is that the Patent Office tends to look at prior art as being "things that have already been patented" so when rules change, a lot of things that seem obvious are up for grabs because there's no prior patent. Now, these can (and are) challenged in court and, in court, they're more likely to accept blatant prior usage in the wild. i don;t know whether this case won it's challenge but it's possible that it didn't because XML was quite new in the late 90s too.

Source: I have a patent from around that time that's basically covers anything in finance that's data driven from an XML document. For about a decade, that covered a fairly large chunk of finance. I never did anything about it as I disagreed in principle with the premise of such an absurdly broad patent. I agreed to it being patented solely for defensive reasons ie it might prevent a competitor from egregiously attacking my employer with patents.

If you're sufficiently creative, certainly. Some of my friends patented something totally absurd: there's a transformation you can easily do in software and lots of software does it quite routinely. They did it twice. Patent issued.

You can try to patent anything, but patent might not be accepted.

The thing is that patent office is funded by patent fees, so there is an incentive to accept the patent plus they are often hard to read.