It's roughly the same, legally, and I was well aware of that.

Legally speaking, you also want to be careful about your dependencies and their licenses, a company that's afraid to get sued usually goes to quite some lengths to ensure they play this stuff safe. A lot of smaller companies and startups don't know or don't care.

From a professional ethics perspective, personally, I don't want to put my clients in that position unless they consciously decide they want that. They hire professionals not just to get work done they fully understand, but to a large part to have someone who tells them what they don't know.

You raise a good point. It was kinda gray in the SO days. You almost always had to change something to get your code to work. But at lot of LLM's can spit out code that you can just paste in. And, I guess maybe the tests all pass, but if it goes wrong, you, the coder probably don't know where it went wrong. But if you'd written it all yourself, you could probably guess.

I'm still sorting all this stuff out personally. I like LLM's when I work in an area I know well. But vibing in areas of technology that I don't know well just feels weird.

SO seems different because the author of the post is republishing it. If they are republishing copyrighted material without notice, it seems like the SO author is the one in violation of copyright.

In the LLM case, I think it’s more of an open question whether the LLM output is republishing the copyrighted content without notice, or simply providing access to copyrighted content. I think the former would put the LLM provider in hot water, while the latter would put the user in hot water.

“We” took care to not copy it verbatim (it’s the concrete code form that is copyrighted, not the algorithm), and depending on jurisdiction there is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality in copyright law, which short code snippets on Stack Overflow typically don’t meet.