Could be trash or could be gold.
Please don't let this become an "us versus them" ideology.
Progress is always uncomfortable for some people. Jobs and skills have always been displaced by advancements in technology.
All the vision, direction, yea-or-nay answers to LLM suggestions comes from the human, all the coding, testing, bug-hunting is done by the LLM.
An LLM is excellent at pulling together paths between nodes in its weights database and providing solutions to link these two hitherto disparate states, but it lacks the creativity of the human, the desire to make something, the passion of creation, admittedly at a slightly farther distance than has been the case to date.
"Vibe coding" and "AI Slop" are terms (~coined~) employed by the threatened and the scared, IM(NSH)O. They denigrate unfairly, and while they may have been appropriate for early-stage LLMs, todays systems are different constructs entirely.
In a decade, you'll be the uncommon software engineer if you're doing things all on your own, a curiosity, akin to the Amish. Life is change, and embracing the change is the only way to succeed in an ever-changing world. Yes, there will be fallout; yes there will be consequences, and yes there will be opportunity.
I didn't wrote so because it would made me perceive the flow of my prose "clunky". In other words, i didn't want acclaimed scientist's name in my argument as it would made it too complex to me.
When AI coders in general care about anything more than the "vibe" and no longer consider touching the code to be beneath their contempt, we can stop calling it what it is.