'vibe coding' is too loose a term. Everything will be generated by AI in the very near future, and it will range from 'fancy auto complete' to 'entirely autonomously generated' with many nuances and subtleties in between.
New code will still need to be written though.
It's not reasonable to suggest that AI is only going to repeat older patterns that have been trodden before, or 'things that don't matter'.
AI will be writing most new code, by far.
Without even getting into complicated arguments about 'creativity' - the AI is an encyclopedia of best practices, and can think a couple of steps ahead for most things you'll ever want to do.
Like pro chess players thinking they're going to beat the algo with some kind of fancy human creativity.
Developers roles are changing, very fundamentally, you're now 1/2 a layer of abstraction above the code, and you're not going to writing it better than AI (in most cases) any more than a human will be better at sawing wood than the power tools. And yet, carpenters still exist.
But you’re also never going to convince the people who still only run vi on the Linux console, without Xorg…
Edit: I have my popcorn ready for when the VC subsidies end.
Do you even know what your job is?
Your job as a developer is not to produce brilliant code - it's to produce code that is so standard, disciplined, off-the-shelf and normative that it's utterly boring.
That is exactly what the AI is good at - 'the boring standard'.
-> AI is not harming anyone's cognitive abilities.
-> Cost of AI is marginal - $200/mo for a tool while devs earn >>$100K, is the cost of tires on a car
-> Token prices are dropping by 90% per year, today's AI is already pretty good, it will be a commodity soon, but we'll continue to pay probably even more than $200/mo because the value is there.
I taught myself BASIC in the 1980's and there's code I wrote in the 1990's that is literally still in production to this day. There's probably a decent chance that I've had code in production since before you were born. Over the span of those decades, it's very clear that there's a fundamental transformation, which is totally unassailable.