Decompiling / disassembling and annotating old software, making sure it can build cleanly back to the original binary, and then look for bugs or subtle issues.
Another one I did was a printer data stream translator from an obscure format to PostScript/PDF (or just PNGs), complete with cups support, etc so these old apps can easily be hooked up.
Flash is capable now of running long range defined-goal tasks like this.
I wondered this too. Also, the duration of the task depends on the quality of the prompt and the model used. I have a feeling a lot of these day-long tasks are bogged down by suboptimal tool use and on-demand python slop.