[gagege]

Throwing ideas around is almost always helpful. Often when someone points out a solution to a problem or presents a good idea for something new, someone else, who hadn't thought of it themselves, will be inspired and go do the implementation. What's wrong with that?

[Jormundir]

I think your point makes sense for throwing out specific ideas to specific problems, but I don't think throwing out a general solution (lacking any concrete implementation) to a general problem is going to make someone who is capable of the implementation suddenly realize they overlooked a giant area.

This article can be boiled down to: Project idea: better IDEs.

It's in the same vein as comments like: Business idea: nuclear fusion.

They just aren't productive / valuable.

If say Henry Ford said: Project idea: Use energy from chambered oil combustion with pistons to convert direction of force into a spinning axis to create an horseless vehicle. (I'm obviously not a car expert) Then we would be talking about a valuable idea.

My viewpoint is simple: Ideas are not innately valuable, of all the ideas in the world, only a subset of them are valuable. Obviously you don't know what current ideas will be valuable in the future, but I have a heuristic: for an idea to be valuable, it must be a specific (implementation details included (batteries included)) idea.