Comment by chadcmulligan
10 hours ago
what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything.
As Claude said to me when I said the same thing - it's not really its idea you had to ask the right questions. I find this true in some ways - asking the right question and finding out what the AI's have hidden inside them is like panning for gold imho.
> what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything.
It used to be that we only recognized a tiny fraction of the actual ideas involved, because most of them were intermingled with execution. We would sit there and bang out code at single-digit WPM while trying to keep block diagrams of process memory (or UML diagrams, or whatever else) in our heads, and then run the compiler and/or the tests and realize we'd gone wrong anyway.
Now we have lightning-fast "execution" devoid of real insight (just making choices more or less arbitrarily as they come up) because the LLM can do more and more without human intervention, but for some tasks it goes off the rails because the insight actually is necessary.
I never really bought into it, I still think ideas are hard, and execution may be a little easier, but still hard to. The lack of thousands of amazing new startups since AI sort of validates this.