>Could an AI have done it faster? Who knows. I’ve tried using Cursor with Claude on stuff like this and it tends to take a very long time, makes mistakes, and ends up digging itself further into holes until I clean up after it. With the size of the code base and the long compile times I’m not sure it would have been able to do it.

I've found the same thing, but I have also found that gen AI is pretty good at creating a script to do this. Generally, for very deterministic, repeated changes, I've found having the LLM write code is way better than having it makes a lot of changes. As it has to read more files, the context gets filled, and it starts to get goofy.