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

Overview

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Highlights

Transcript

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

How I AI

Jun 29
How I AI

How I AI

Jun 29
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

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 engi...

Highlights

Gusto CTO Eddie Kim details how he and a tiny team of five built a new AI product, Gusto Cofounder, from scratch in just 10 weeks. They achieved this by discarding nearly all traditional engineering processes, including meetings, documentation, and project management tools, in favor of a radical, code-first approach.
00:00
Built in 10 weeks with 5 people, no meetings, no docs.
05:40
Long breaks often spark innovation.
08:33
Built in 10 weeks with no meetings, no tech specs, no Figma, no Jira.
12:51
Everyone acted as a PM.
14:38
Low cost of code makes discarding prototypes feasible
17:18
Building agents is not as intimidating as it seems
19:10
Ship a fake prototype, then chip away like marble.
22:04
Technical curiosity and team mentorship enable non-engineers to ship production code.
29:06
Gusto Cofounder integrates with existing data and supports multi-channel communication.
34:36
Act on ambitious ideas immediately rather than planning months ahead.
36:27
Write a failing eval, then fix the code to pass it
39:39
Keep the team small and skip the docs.
46:00
Hands-on coding reveals product insights

Chapters

Intro: five people, 10 weeks
00:00
The origins of Cofounder
02:38
Inside the 10-week build process
08:32
Building with no PMs
12:50
The “trash can” method
14:38
The stack architecture
17:15
Shipping to production from day one
19:10
How a designer became a top engineer
22:03
Demo: Cofounder over text and Slack
29:05
Demo: running a real payroll
31:45
Live coding with evals in Claude Code
36:26
Recap: prototype, small team, permission
39:39
Lightning round
43:17
Where to find Eddie and Cofounder
48:44

Transcript

Eddie Kim: We had no meetings, We had no tech specs. We had no Figma. We had no Jira board where we tracked stories or tracked work. We had nothing. We used Cloudflare Workers for the actual agent loop and Vercel AI SDK. That's it. Claire Vo: People get r...