and these employees with technical understanding can be Llms. And baring the risk of being cut off from the models how is that different from hiring humans?

you are probably smarter and more skillful then I am, but despite coding all my life for a living I feel that AI is vastly better than me in every single skill that I thought are my strongest skills.

I also think that the risk for a small company is larger that their only programmer who understand the code base quits than the ai not being able to fix issues in its own code.

The only point of disagreement is if llms are already good enough. And for a lot of people this is already true today.