I meant in the sense that the "tool" is an LLM and the "work" was vibe coded.

If vibe coded work is not copyrightable, it cannot be reassigned to the employer and become copyright protected.

This is the sharpest point in the thread. You are right if the output has no copyright to begin with, there is nothing to assign. The employer's contractual claim over purely AI-generated code is not a copyright claim, it is a trade secret and confidentiality claim. Those are weaker protections: they require the information to remain secret, they do not survive disclosure, and they cannot be enforced against independent creation of the same code. Most IP assignment clauses in employment contracts were not drafted with this scenario in mind and may be claiming rights that do not legally exist.

correct