>Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?

Isn't the answer on SO the result of a human intelligence writing it in the first place, and then voted by several human intelligencies to top place? If an LLM was merely an automated "equivalent" to that, that's already a good thing!

But in general, the LLM answer you appear to dismiss amounts to a lot more:

  Having an close-to-good-human-level programmer 
  understand your existing codebase
  answer questions about your existing codebase 
  answer questions about changes you want to make
  on demand (not confined to copying SO answers)
  interactively 
  and even being able to go in and make the changes

That amounts to "manually typing an SO answer" about as much as a pickup truck amounts to a horse carriage.

Or, to put it another way, isn't "the logical endpoint" of hiring another programmer and asking them to fix X "equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into their computer"?

>And I pick Stackoverflow deliberately: it's a great resources, but not reliable enough to use blindly. I feel we are in a similar situation with AI at the moment.

Well, we shouldn't be using either blindly anyway. Not even the input of another human programmer (that's way we do PR reviews).