I think it's more of a workforce reduction technique in some areas. how much is the issue, and lots of "it depends" but even at a higher up-front cost, LLMs have higher value and less liability. Instead of offshoring/outsourcing for example, you can have the same local devs that were leading/managing the offshore teams manage LLMs instead. Or if you have 10 expensive devs making 200k, just halving that is a million/year. even if that million is spent on tokens (even double or triple that) it might not be that much outside of what they would have been willing to pay for more devs anyways if there was the need, except now they have to deal with less people to manage overall. less lawyers, less hr, less lawsuits, less hiring and promption costs, less insurance premiums. Even if the quality of the work is a whole lot less, they only care about a viable product being shipped, and how much the lower quality affects profit margins.
I'll say this, laws and regulation are sorely needed. all this hate against billionaires, ceos, ai-bros, whatever... might or might not be warranted, but it is fruitless. Redirect this energy to your law makers.
In China for example, they made it illegal to use AI for the sole purpose of replacing human workers. The CEOs aren't bad CEOs, they aren't great either, it depends on the outcome. There are scenarios where entire job roles can be replaced by LLMs, but for complex roles like developers, you always need some human devs still, but likewise, almost always less of them than before. However, although less devs might be needed to do the same work, in some cases LLMs open up possibilities that weren't there before, so more devs babysitting LLMs or working on designing/shipping more features is also a strong possibility.
I mean, companies aren't trying to simply save cost on employees, they also want to maximize profits. Less devs per feature isn't the same as less devs period.
Overall, I'll say that demand creates its own supply. The internet itself killed many job roles and reduced the number of people you needed for many others, but it's not like we have the huge unemployment many were afraid of decades ago, if anything it created lots of more jobs. LLMs simply can't do everything people can, so they're not a drop-in replacement, that alone should mean a lot in terms of supply/demand economics.