The Age of Ideas
James Dirksen
The Age of Engineering: When Code Was King
We had a phrase that perfectly captured the past: "There's an app for that." It became the rallying cry of innovation, the promise that any problem, quirk, or fancy could be satisfied with software. But behind that phrase there was a reality: If you wanted to build that app, you had two choices: You could either be (or become) a software developer yourself, or you could afford to pay one. Often multiple ones. For a very long time.
For my past quarter-century working in startups, scale-up, and public companies, every software initiative faced the same brutal reality: the bottleneck will be engineering. Ideas were cheap, execution was expensive, and the cost of that execution was measured in developer salaries. In my world of cybersecurity, timelines stretched for years to get a mature, secure, fully-featured application.
The barriers were real and punishing. A simple MVP might take a year and $750,000. A more complex application could easily consume millions of dollars and years of development time. The engineering bottleneck wasn't just about money—it was about time, about finding the right talent, about managing technical debt, scaling and holding teams together, about security, about deployment, and maintenance.
I can’t count how many brilliant ideas I heard or I had that died on the vine because their creators couldn't code and couldn't afford to hire those who could. I imagine a million ideas that should have existed never had a chance in The Age of Engineering. Many times the value that would be created in the world if the app existed just wasn’t worth the cost in money and time that it would take to bring it to life.
999,000 would have been there just to scratch an itch, but never did because selection pressure favored people with technical skill or deep pockets over those with new ideas.
But I bet 1,000 of them would have been brilliant and changed the world.
The Dawn of the Age of the Idea
But something remarkable is being born right now—the Age of the Idea—where the primary constraint will shift from engineering capability and financial backing to imagination itself.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the most creative people I’ve ever worked with are SW developers. The best software developers can take poorly-defined ideas from a goofy product person like me and come up with remarkably creative solutions and produce amazing products that delight thousands or millions. It truly is an art-form more than a science, but it still takes time and money.
But now, with tools like Replit, Lovable, Cursor, Claude's Artifacts, GitHub Copilot, we are seeing a fundamental change in the equation. Suddenly, someone with no coding experience can sit down with an idea and, within hours or days, have a working application.
Let me be clear: these applications aren’t perfect. Right now, they aren’t even good.
They won't be secure by enterprise standards. The creator may barely understand how they work under the hood. But here's the revolutionary part—they will do the thing. They will solve the problem. At least to the level where you can validate the idea, they will serve customer.
This shift is profound because it's not just about making development faster or cheaper. It's about opening up by two orders of magnitude who gets to be an innovator.
The clever product manager who could never code.
The domain expert who understood their industry's problems better than they could ever explain to any SW developer.
The creative who could envision solutions that technical minds might never consider.
Any kid with an idea.
We’re in the Awkward Adolescent of the Age of Ideas
We're still in the early days of The Age Of The Ideas, but I built an application yesterday in 4 hours that allowed users to sign up, set up multi-factor authentication, let them interact with the application, it could sell add-on products, and it could send leads to affiliate partners. And it worked.
I wouldn’t recommend that anyone ever use it.
Just from a security perspective, I could think of a dozen ways to break it and harvest data from it. It would likely take me many tens of thousands of dollars to hire a red team, produce a list of “findings” 23 pages long, and then 12 months of developer time to fix all that auto-generated code. And I still probably wouldn’t trust it.
But, could I show it to someone? Yep.
Could I validate it with user groups? Absolutely.
Could I raise money from a VC? Well, all you have to do is put AI in your deck to raise from most VCs now, so let me rephrase that: Could I raise $3M from a smart VC who understood that AI is just a tool, not a differentiator, and get to work on building the real product? No doubt in my mind.
And QED. We’re not quite their year, but what a leap forward! In my last startup I couldn’t have even done a passable job coding up our website, but yesterday I built a prototype. A prototype that I think I could raise a seed round on. To a person like me (maybe you) this is a huge step forward. I just jumped over the first year of time and expense.
The Future is Coming Soon. I Promise.
The trajectory is clear. Soon—perhaps within the next few years—someone with an idea will be able to sit down in the morning and have a fully functional, secure, scalable SaaS application by evening.
This isn't science fiction. The pieces are already falling into place. It’s all a lot like an 8th grade school dance with lots of awkward bits and not-quite-rightness, but you can see the potential.
Remember, today is the worst AI will ever be.
Models are becoming more sophisticated at understanding requirements and generating code. Infrastructure provisioning is becoming more automated. Security and compliance are being built into rather than bolted on afterward.
In summary, does it work now? Kinda. Will it work? Bet on it.
We Stand on the Shoulders of Hand Jammers
Ironically, for this Age of Ideas to emerge, we have the Age of Engineering folks to thank. Organizations have spent and are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of coding hours to create this new age. One age laying the groundwork for the next. It’s happened before.
Alchemists pursued mystical transmutation and purification using experimental techniques and substance classification which laid the groundwork for empirical chemistry which has led to unimaginable human flourishing.
Analog telephone networks and radio communication created global connectivity and then engineers at DARPA reimagined communication as packet-switched digital networks, giving rise to the internet which has led to cat videos
We Are The New Alchemists.
Imagine you are someone who knows nothing about code (gold) but knows what needs to be done in order to make your world a better place (do something with all this lead!).
One morning you get up and create three new things in the world:
Something for yourself: “Build a web-based personal finance dashboard that securely connects to my bank accounts via API and helps me categorize expenses, visualize trends, and suggest monthly savings goals using AI. It then sends me an accountability message every day to keep me on track.”
Something for your practice: “Create a HIPAA-conscious journaling app for therapists and patients that includes daily mood tracking, keyword-based mental health alerts, and end-to-end encrypted session summaries. Watch what happens with my clients over time and develop better, evidence based suggestions for me to try.”
Something for an entire industry you always hear your friend complaining about: “Develop a simple inventory and delivery tracking tool for warehouses that logs incoming/outgoing items based on voice inputs from a ‘walkie-talkie’ input, assigns drivers, and provides SMS status updates. Every day look for some anomaly in efficiency and bring it to my attention.”
You just tell the coding applications to make sure that each application is “complete with user authentication, data persistence, API integrations, mobile responsiveness, and true security measures.”
The implications are staggering. We're moving toward a world where:
The time from idea to market validation will be measured in weeks, not years.
The cost of experimentation approaches zero.
The global pool of potential innovators expands from millions to billions.
What This Means for Innovation
The Age of the Idea will unleash a Cambrian explosion of innovation. When the cost of testing an idea approaches zero, people will test orders of magnitude more ideas. When you don't need to spend months convincing investors or technical co-founders, you can simply build something and see if it works.
This democratization will surface solutions from unexpected places.
The nurse who understands hospital workflows better than any Silicon Valley engineer and gives the tool prompts on her breaks.
The teacher who sees educational challenges that edtech companies miss and codes the next great breakthrough over Spring Break.
The small business owner who experiences pain points that enterprise software giants ignore (we’re looking at you, Intuit).
But this shift also means that competitive advantage will increasingly come from the quality and quantity of ideas rather than the dollars and time spent in the execution of code.
Don’t be fooled, just building a great product that does what it should is NEVER enough. Company execution will still matter: Market timing, marketing, sales, user experience, support, business model, and relationships will matter. But all of those will be enabled by Age of Ideas breakthroughs as well, so it all comes back to good ideas.
The Transformation Has Already Begun
Software will eat the world, and we're living through one of the most significant shifts in the history of software development. The Age of Engineering, with its high barriers and technical gatekeepers, is giving way to the Age of the Idea, where imagination becomes the primary constraint.
This transition will happen seemingly overnight, but it won't be without challenges. Questions about security, scalability, and maintainability will need answers. New forms of technical debt will emerge. The democratization of development will initially flood the market with low-quality applications.
But this change is inevitable and irreversible. The tools are getting better every month. In fact, the Age of Engineering companies are using Age of Ideas tools to the point where most of the new code they produce is not written by humans.
And somewhere, right now, someone with no coding experience is about to start building something that will change the world forever.
The Age of the Idea is (almost) here. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen—it's what part will you play in it.
What idea have you been carrying around that you never built because you couldn't code or afford someone who could? Have you ever even taken 60 minutes to stop and think about that question and see what great idea is currently locked inside your brain. The barriers that stopped you yesterday might not exist.
Leave your ideas in the comments–maybe we’ll build the next big thing together.