No Figma. No Jira. No docs. How Gusto built a new product line with Claude Code | Eddie Kim (CTO)

June 29, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

When Gusto CTO Eddie Kim missed his connecting flight in London and found himself with a five-hour layover, he didn't scroll Twitter. He opened Claude Code and started building. That prototype, coded in a single afternoon, became the foundation of Gusto Co-Founder, a new product line that five people shipped from zero code to a tier-one launch in 10 weeks. The team had no meetings, no Figma files, no Jira board, no documentation, and no product manager. They had a whiteboard sketch, a 24/7 Zoom room, and a willingness to throw away code the moment it stopped serving them.

The trash can method of software engineering

The core mechanism that made this speed possible is what Kim calls "the trash can method of software engineering." Because the cost of writing code has collapsed, the team could build a feature, open a real pull request ready for human review, discuss it in the perma-Zoom, and then simply close the PR if the answer was "no." They didn't need to spec it out in advance or argue about whether it was worth building. They just built it, looked at it, and deleted it if it didn't work.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **The Zero-Artifact Build Philosophy** - Eddie Kim describes building Gusto Co-Founder with no meetings, no Figma, no Jira, no docs, just a Cloudflare Worker and Vercel AI SDK
2 (03:06) **Origin Story: The 5-Hour Layover Prototype** - Eddie was stuck in London on a delayed flight and started vibe-coding a prototype of what became Gusto Co-Founder
3 (08:35) **The Build Process: No Meetings, No Docs, No Jira** - The team of 5 operated with zero traditional process artifacts
4 (12:57) **The Trash Can Method of Software Engineering** - How the team made product decisions without a PM
5 (17:21) **The Surprisingly Simple Tech Stack** - Cloudflare Worker + Vercel AI SDK, nothing else
6 (19:36) **Shipping to Production from Day One** - The team built in production behind a feature flag, starting with a fake front-end experience
7 (22:06) **The Designer Who Became a Top Engineer** - Katie, the designer, ranked in the 94th percentile for PR throughput across the entire R&D org

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Eddie Kim is the co-founder and CTO of the payroll and HR platform Gusto, which just crossed $1 billion in revenue and serves more than 500,000 small businesses. Recently he did something most CTOs don’t: he went back to writing code. With three other engineers and one designer, Eddie built Gusto Cofounder, a net-new AI product, from zero code to a tier-one launch in 10 weeks. He walks through how that team actually worked, why they threw out nearly every process, and how anyone can copy the approach.

What you’ll learn:

The trash-can method: how to write, review, and delete a full PR as a product decision instead of a planning doc
The two-tool agent stack behind Gusto Cofounder
The exact “perma-Zoom” setup that replaced standups, retros, and Slack threads for 10 weeks
How a designer with no engineering background hit the 94th percentile for shipping code
The eval-first workflow Eddie uses to fix real customer bugs with Claude Code
How a non-technical leader can prototype an idea to win buy-in, then carry it all the way to production-quality code

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Brought to you by:

Magic Patterns—Prototypes that look like your product

Jira Product Discovery—Prioritize with insights, build with confidence

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Intro: five people, 10 weeks

(02:38) The origins of Cofounder

(08:32) Inside the 10-week build process

(12:50) Building with no PMs

(14:38) The “trash can” method

(17:15) The stack architecture

(19:10) Shipping to production from day one

(22:03) How a designer became a top engineer

(29:05) Demo: Cofounder over text and Slack

(31:45) Demo: running a real payroll

(36:26) Live coding with evals in Claude Code

(39:39) Recap: prototype, small team, permission

(43:17) Lightning round

(48:44) Where to find Eddie and Cofounder

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Tools referenced:

• Gusto Cofounder (early access/waitlist): https://gusto.com/cofounder

• Claude Code (Anthropic): https://claude.ai/code

• Cloudflare Workers: https://workers.cloudflare.com/

• Vercel AI SDK: https://sdk.vercel.ai/

• DX (engineering analytics): http