Comment by nextaccountic

The proper tool for this is ast-grep (sg) https://ast-grep.github.io/

And an agent can learn to use sg with a skill too. (Or they can use sed)

The issue is, at every point you do a replace, you need to verify if it was the right thing to do or if it was a false positive.

If you are doing this manually, there's the time to craft the sed or sg query, then for each replacement you need to check it. If there are dozens, that's probably okay. If there are hundreds, it's less appealing to check them manually. (Then there's the issue of updating docs, and other things like this)

People use agents because not only they don't want to write the initial sed script, they also don't want to verify at each place if it was correctly applied, and much less update docs. The root of this is laziness, but for decades we have hailed laziness as a virtue in programming.