Yesterday I opened up Cursor, planning to build an idea. I typed two lines and froze, because I realized something a bit funny: the hard part now isn't building. The hard part is knowing whether to build at all.
The pickaxe in my hand is sharp. But I'm standing in the middle of a field, with no idea where to dig.
Pickaxes are 1000× cheaper now
A few years ago, turning an idea into a product required a dev team, several months, and a non-trivial amount of money. Now? An evening, a cup of coffee, a Cursor or Claude Code window open — and by morning you have an MVP to show your friends.
It's a miracle. Truly. But like every miracle, it leaves behind a slightly uncomfortable question: if everyone can do it, why bother doing it?
The 1849 lesson everyone forgets
In 1849, hundreds of thousands of people poured into California to dig for gold. They brought pickaxes, shovels, and very large dreams.
Ninety percent went broke.
The two richest men from that gold rush weren't gold diggers. One was Levi Strauss — who sold jeans to the miners. The other was Samuel Brannan — who sold pickaxes and shovels. Neither of them ever went down a mine.
History seems to be repeating itself, except the pickaxe is now called OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Nvidia. But the interesting question isn't "who's selling pickaxes" — everyone already knows the answer to that. The interesting question is: if you're the one doing the digging, how do you avoid being part of the 90%?
Chinese whispers: when an idea gets retold one too many times
I have a slightly time-consuming habit: scrolling Twitter and Product Hunt every night. And the more I scroll, the more I notice something getting diluted.
Every week there's a new "viral" idea. A small app, an extension, an AI workflow. Cool stuff. Then a week later, I see five near-identical versions. The week after, twenty. By version thirty, the maker doesn't even remember the origin — they just see "this is the trend right now," and they have a pickaxe, so they dig.
The original idea is like a story told around a campfire. By the fifth person retelling it, the wolf has become a cat, and nobody remembers the moral anymore — but everyone still nods along and says it's a great story.
There's something else I've noticed. When pickaxes were expensive and hard to use, people made small but substantial things. A tool that solved exactly one problem. A product with its own quiet charm. Now that pickaxes are cheap, everyone wants to build "the next big thing" — a tiny pickaxe carrying the ambition to change the entire world.
I feel a little sad for those simple, decent products. The kind that does one thing well, doesn't raise funding, doesn't pivot, has no IPO ambitions. The kind with soul. They seem to be getting rarer — not because people stopped loving them, but because when the pickaxe in your hand is too sharp, thinking small starts to feel like a waste.
So where is the actual "gold"?
I don't have a definitive answer — but I suspect it's these three things.
First, taste. The ability to look at an idea and know whether it's a real mine or just shimmering wet sand. To know when to stop, what to cut, what to keep. AI gives you the pickaxe. Taste it does not.
Second, distribution. You build the thing — but who do you tell? Here's an unfun truth: a mediocre product + a good audience will always beat an excellent product + silence. In a world where anyone can build, the person who has someone to tell is the one who wins.
Third, depth. When a hundred people clone you in a week, only the one who understands most deeply why they're doing this gets to keep going. The rest will pivot, give up, or chase ten more ideas until they forget what they originally started for.
Ideas are still gold. But raw gold. The thing that turns it into the jewelry people actually wear is those three things above — and none of them are in Cursor's documentation.
I'm still figuring it out
This isn't really advice — I'm mostly writing it for myself. Because I'm sitting right there too, in the middle of the field, pickaxe in hand.
Some days I feel like I'm about to find the mine. Some days I realize I'm just digging... a hole. Some days I close the laptop, go make a coffee, and wonder whether the thing I should be sharpening isn't the pickaxe, but the eye that knows where it's worth digging in the first place.
Maybe this era isn't short on builders. Maybe it's short on people willing to think carefully before they build.
And maybe the most precious thing right now isn't ideas, isn't pickaxes, isn't gold. It's the patience not to start digging the moment you hear there's a mine.