But it doesn’t work! You hear all sorts of anecdotes about a business who retrenched their workforce to replace with LLMs, everything comes crashing down and they have to rehire all their workforce at higher rates.

It would be interesting to see actual verified numbers. I am sure that a lot of useless people can be replaced with computers, but most of the time, all it requires is a very small sh script, it doesn’t need a monstrous data centre that uses more water and power than a human.