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.