>Third, employees that can leverage AI to be more productive are more valuable than before. Why would an employer want to get rid of somebody that is now delivering more?

Here's a charitable take, assuming there's no messed up internal politics in a company going on: Because not everyone at a company is working at the same speed.

If you have developers who are now sitting around doing almost nothing because the stakeholders and product teams aren't using AI yet, then you have a bottleneck. Even before LLMs, if you had an excess of developers to the speed the teams they depend on deliver, you'd lay them off all the same.

There's two ways to go about this: The company either lays off engineers and delivers at the same speed as it did before, trading personnel cost for tokens (Showing it's a company that doesn't want to grow or is currently unable to), or alternatively the company keeps things as is and forces the rest of the departments to grow with the new added velocity from the engineering teams.