I wouldn't recommend applying with no idea even if they allow it again. My group got to the interview round with no idea last year. Here's in practice what happened: The entire interview was spent by the interviewers trying to see if we had good ideas that we just weren't aware of. (No, pg wasn't one of them) I would say that, yes, we do have ideas, but we hadn't sat down and talked about them, so we were brainstorming under pressure without any preparation.

It was weird because we actually had intentionally not prepared any ideas because we were on the "no ideas" track. We spent our prep time practicing questions about ourselves, and our team.

What we learned after and what was said to us by YC staff was that the no ideas track ended up having a higher bar of entry. It makes sense because you're bringing less to the table, so the bar has to be higher.

My suggestion would be, sit down and make some ideas with your team, and build a small prototype. That's really your best bet if you want to get in, it will make your interview more predictable, etc.

We haven't decided yet. For now that's commented out.

I haven't seen YC's success with no-idea applicants, but I feel that being able to generate an idea is an important attribute to look for in founders even if you don't care what the actual idea is. In PG's running back analogy, it's like testing to see if they can move laterally vs being a "downhill runner"