alt Hacker NewsYes and no.
Let's first settle on the definition of vibecoding so that we're not miscommunicating over definitions. I'm using the one that seems the median definition nowadays: >95% of the code written by LLMs, <60% of the output code human-reviewed, meaning there's a large part of the codebase that no human ever reviews.
As you said it's about time invested in thinking about it, yes. But remember that even pre-AI >90% of software got never used, it was dead on arrival. Look up "success rate of software projects in business".
You can put lots of time into thinking and vibecode everything. You can put very little time into thinking and write by hand. Of course, vibecoding makes the former much more likely. But nothing about it is inherent to it.
I hate to be the guy arguing semantics, but is that the median definition? Everyone I know defines vibe coding as ignoring the actual output code completely and evaluating the result by how it behaves under test. Non-coders vibe code by default, because they don't understand how to read the code in the first place. Developers vibe code when they just trust the LLM to have been right about the behavior they don't explicitly test for. Vibe coding is the act of ignoring most possible friction, for better or worse.