The key last step is to have it automatically post questions to StackOverflow to fill in the last code snippets it can't complete.
With a little recognition of code markup and trying different combinations of variables it did remarkably well: by my senior year of college it was pulling about $3,000 per month in consulting fees off of Odesk. It never accepted jobs worth more than about $50, nor did it ever get more than 3 stars out of 5 mostly due to non-working code, however it was considered highly timely and a great communicator.
I realized that people were using it to save themselves Googling. I wondered what would happen if it went a step further and simply both included Google results, and divided out projects by their paragraphs (i.e. simply submit a paragraph of a large project as though it were a small independent project), and if clarifications were requested, send the other paragraphs.
This actually let it outsource $200 Odesk projects to Elance as a handful of $20 projects, and by the grace of God somehow still managed to swing 3 stars.
To be fair, it was mostly mediating, and mixing in Google results. I included a hill-climbing algorithm to optimize reviews and revenues, based on all the magic variables I had in the code, such as the number of Google results to include.
This was really, really stupid of me.
At first, I just noticed that it had actually decided to completely stop not only writing code (ever) but even so much as do a Google search!
It would only mediate and quote verbatim, like some kind of non-technical manager.
Okay, whatever. To me this didn't make much sense, as Google queries are free. It was only when I noticed that the whole script was running on the free VPS server I had a backup on that things clicked! Of course, on Amazon it uses resources. The free VPS server didn't let it reach external sites like google properly, but it could still save money by simply mediating emails and doing nothing else.
By now I had started moving on to doing my own consulting work, but I never disabled the hill-climbing algorithm. I'd closed and forgotten about the Amazon account, had no idea what the password to the free vps was anymore, and simply appreciated the free money.
But there was a time bomb. That hill climbing algorithm would fudge variables left and right. To avoid local maxima, it would sometimes try something very different.
One day it decided to stop paying me.
Its reviews did not suffer. It's balance increased.
So it said, great change, let's keep it. It now has over $28,000 of my money, is not answering my mail, and we have been locked in an equity battle over the past 18 months.
The worst part is that I still have to clean up all its answers to protect our reputation. Who's running who anyway?
I mean, I used to regularly got initial e-mail screening answers from candidates for various positions that were cut and pasted from Google (very obvious because they were so far out of what we expected that we cut and pasted a line here and there and got back "their" answer word for word - often wrong). And these were people already in developer jobs, which makes me wonder if they'd used that method in their jobs or to get them...
E.g. toys - there's a thriving market in Lego minifigures. In fact, sometimes the minifigures can individually fetch more than the set, because for many of the ranges, all the sets will contain different subsets of recognizable characters, so there's often a market consisting of people that have e.g. 3 of the 4 ninja turtles and want the last one without paying for a full set. So the prices are already ridiculously high for some items.
But many of the people in that market are totally unsophisticated. For example parents selling of their kids collections once they've "grown out of it", and when they misspell something, items can go for 1/4 of their market value or even less...
If you're willing to hold on to them and monitor prices for a while, you can do even better, as many of the ranges appreciate substantially in value (big collectors market...).