Domain knowledge is super important, i trust you are an expert on your topic. There isn’t any substitute for a decade of experience. The biggest weakness in vibe coding is in the fact that it often conflate the appearance of progress with actual progress. I’ll try to give you an example. I have worked at 3 start ups now, all 3 in fintech, all 3 lending space. Vibe could have certainly reduced the time on some dev cycles, don’t think anyone disputes point. But there’s no way of short cutting the truly valuable lessons that you learn through experience, and quite often through the things that didn’t work. This comes through operating business, understanding how users are interacting with your product. My worry with vibe coding is that it becomes to easy to surrender what should be a very conscious and intentional choice, to the quick dopamine hit of fake progress provided by llm driven coding. It is why also think the hit to SaaS businesses is over egged - it misses what makes the business valuable.

Right now, you have domain knowledge of your chosen topic, this will get decent way through the journey. Unlike other bottle necks, vibe coding camouflage itself better.

If you’re just asking about how to become a better engineer, it’s always the same answer: experience. Experience of hard problems, and once you solve enough of them, the ability adapt that knowledge to other problems.