I'm sure there are cognitive declines as you age, but even discounting those there's some fundamental change happening to the opportunity space.

I'm in my mid 40s, I've had a really fulfilling career working on interesting things and making decent money, and over that time have accumulated a few passion projects that I knew were always out of my reach.

Well, technically within my reach but I'd need to somehow find someone to pay for me and a team for some period of time to work on stuff.

When I started playing around with these tools, it started feeling like maybe some of my ideas were within reach. Some time after, it felt plausible enough that I've decided to go for it. I'm actively in the middle of some deep performance research that I simply would not have the bandwidth or capacity for without these tools.

I've also managed to acquire enough confidence in the likelyhood of some degree of success that I'm investing in starting a company (self-funded) to develop and release and license the stuff i'm building.

I don't know exactly how my ideas will turn out, but that's part of the excitement and anticipation. Point is I never felt I had enough breathing room to really go for it (between normal life obligations like mortgage, feeding kids, etc.)

These tools have changed the equation enough that it's made it more feasible for me to pursue some of these ideas on my own. Things I would have shelved for the rest of my life, probably.. or maybe tried to encourage and interest others into doing.