I think they can be reconciled.

Idea debt is over-valuing existing ideas. You just have a few dozen plans that you keep going over and not acting on.

Coming up with a bunch of ideas would make that harder. You would have thousands and thousands if you kept them, so you just discard them while still improving the skill of having good ideas for when it counts.

I like this line of thought. If you are an idea machine, you're actually a lot less likely to be tied to any one idea and ride it down to the bitter end. Instead, you'd realize that most ideas aren't that great and it would take a higher and higher bar to impress yourself.

Maybe the dangerous thing is when ideas are in a state where maybe they're plans but you're uncertain and instead of executing on them or deciding not to you just let them accumulate and sap your attention.

Somewhat anecdotally...

At work, our team isn't the biggest bunch of sports fans so our shoot-the-sh1t talk is primarily fantasy start-up ideas.

We bounce the ideas off each other, critique them, laugh. Just in the last week;

I want to create a VR game that's sync'd to your music and you hook up your exercise machine to to move through the game. (inspired by a DIY post here on HN)

My boss has moved on from a device that will shut down every device in the house for family dinner onto some Medical thing he's 'working on' with a colleague.

It's all good fun, creative & social.

Having ideas is easy, but actually doing something with them is different story. Ok there is minor difference between a good idea and a bad idea, but going from getting a good-enough idea to actually doing something about it, and following the project through to completion, is the hard part.

Related:

https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-most-ridiculous-startup-...