Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

Summary

Remember when coming up with a great idea was the easy part? Ideas were worthless. What was valuable was the commitment. The grit. The planning, the technical prowess, the unwavering ability to think night and day about a product, a problem space, incessantly obsessing, unsatisfied until you had some semblance of a working solution. It took hustle, brain power, studying, iteration, failures.LLMs have shattered this long-held truth into a million pieces.I’ve been writing code for 15 years. In that time, I internalized a simple truth: ideas are cheap, execution is everything. The ability to actually build something—to turn a napkin sketch into working software—was the thing that separated dreamers from builders. It’s what made you valuable.That truth no longer holds.The evidence is overwhelmingI work at Mux. Over the holidays, I had some time off. I decided to build a few ideas I’d been kicking around—tools to solve problems I run into at my day job.I shipped three projects in that break. Not MVPs. Not prototypes. Working products with test suites, documentation, and polish.Driftless helps keep your documentation in sync with your code changes.DeployCast generates AI summaries of your deployments for the rest of your team. Marketing, customer support, executives—anyone who needs to know what changed, explained in plain language, based on the truth of what’s actually in the codebase.Triage lets your users report bugs directly to an AI that triages, formats, and hands off to another AI to implement the fix and open a PR. Your users open pull requests. Not your engineers. These ideas didn’t exist before my break. I described them to Claude Code, and it built them. It wrote automated tests for everything—something I never did consistently in 15 years of shipping software. I had a project acquired once that didn’t have a test suite. Claude Code covered more test cases in hours than I wrote in years.I’m not exaggerating. And neither is anyone else.Stack Overflow, the site t...