> Of course I get downvoted for saying this. HN isn't interested in reality any more.
I suspect that rather many of us are simply just tired of Claude and friends getting shoehorned into any conversation about programming at this point. It is about as fun as the Rust Brigade entering any discussion about C. It adds nothing new to the discussion and it is frankly tiring since we pretty much at any time have a handful of conversations on the front page already covering "AI" topics anyway (counting four at the time of writing this).
Well - except in this conversation it's incredibly relevant. It took six years to do this work when the work is likely mostly mechanical and could have been done much more quickly and safely with an automated system.
I thought automation would be interesting to HN - given the context and the fact it was not used.
An LLM is not a mechanical automated system. A deterministic search and replace would be a mechanical automated system. Clearly it wasn't that simple of a problem though.
What happens if you turn a job like that over to Claude Code? A mess? Good results? Code bloat? Worth trying on existing C programs.