You can't dispense with yourself in those scenarios. You have to read, think, investigate, break things down into smaller problems. But I employ LLM's to help with that all the time.

Granted, that's not vibe coding at all. So I guess we are pretty much in agreement up to this point. Except I still think LLMs speed up this process significantly, and the models and tools are only going to get better.

Also, there are a lot of developers that are just handed the implementation plan.