If LLMs are "transformative" in the same sense as counting "alchemy because of the scientific funding that went into various attempts led into many vital discoveries", what's going to be our version of "actually we can turn lead into gold now, we just have better things to do with the capability"?
Isn't it vibecoding? Turn out it's not really gold
We do have the means today to turn literal lead into literal gold.
The energy is better spent on almost anything else and the gold is radioactive afterwards, but we can do it.
The closest analogy I'd have for vibecoding is combustion engines. Historical antecedent was a toy, early industrial ones took a lot of fuel and were only useful to pump water out of the coal mines that supplied that fuel, but kept getting improved until they made a critical quality leap that took them from "slightly worse than a horse" to "marginally better than a horse" and then there were suddenly a lot of unemployed farriers.
But literal-lead-to-gold took a while longer than that, and a different set of inventions behind it.