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

**Eddie Kim** (0:00)
We had no meetings, we had no tech specs, we had no figmas, we had no Jira board where we track stories or track work. We had nothing. We used Cloudflare Worker for the actual agent loop and Vercell AI SDK. That's it.

**Claire Vo** (0:14)
People get really intimidated by the idea of building an agent, and I'm like, literally, it's an agent SDK running somewhere in the cloud. And if you use AI SDK, you get to switch your model. That's it. It can look up files, it can have tools. It's really not that scary and complicated.

**Eddie Kim** (0:29)
Cofounder was primarily built by five folks over the course of 10 weeks, from initial idea, zero code to a tier one launch at Gusto.

**Claire Vo** (0:40)
How did you all make those precious decisions that only genius product managers can make about in or out of scope? Will this matter?

**Eddie Kim** (0:46)
We would build features and we just have a discussion, like does this make sense to have or not? If it is, then it would get code reviewed right then and there. And if not, we would just delete it.

**Claire Vo** (0:57)
I call this the trash can method of software engineering right now, where you can actually trash all the code, start like a slash V2 branch and rebuild it from scratch. And it's totally reasonable to do because the cost of the code is so low. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, Product Leader and AI Obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have Eddie Kim, CTO and Cofounder of Gusto. And he's going to show us how he, three engineers and one designer, completely rebuild their app in just 10 weeks. This is not a small company and yet they're shipping like they're a startup. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Magic Patterns. Today's engineers use Cursor and Claude Code to ship features in hours that used to take weeks. If you're a designer or PM, you've probably felt a shift too. The pressure to move faster, validate sooner and keep up with the team that's operating at a completely different speed. You've already tried AI prototyping tools to close that gap. But if your prototypes don't look like your actual product, it doesn't matter how fast you can build. You still end up redrawing it by hand. Magic Patterns takes your product team from idea to production, and works from your real design system. When you build a prototype, what you get back actually looks like your product. You'll validate faster, get alignment sooner, and when it's time to build, engineers can connect your prototype to Cursor or Claude Code with the Magic Patterns MCP to pick up where you left off. Your eng team has their AI advantage. Make Magic Patterns yours. Try it today at magicpatterns.com/howiai.
Eddie, thank you for joining How I AI. I'm so excited you reached out to chat because one of my favorite themes that I'm seeing right now is CEOs, CTOs, founders, executives, getting back to building product. And you're here to tell us how you built some product with the team, both very fast and in a completely different way.

**Eddie Kim** (3:03)
Yes, thanks for having me and great to connect again.

**Claire Vo** (3:05)
Yeah, so tell us the story of Cofounder and why you think this is, you know, given all your experience running this company, being a leader, being a builder, why this is so different than what you've seen before.

**Eddie Kim** (3:18)
So first of all, the product is really different from anything that we've built before, but what I'm actually really excited is kind of more of how we built this and how we can take the learnings that we had in building Cofounders, the quality and the speed in which we built this and apply this to, you know, the rest of our R&D organization here at Gusto, which, you know, we have over a thousand people. And so I think we're just, you know, I feel like I just discovered on something like really incredible. And I just want to, like, kind of figure out how do we spread the word to, not just our company, but to any kind of engineering, design or product management, discipline person.

**Claire Vo** (3:57)
And so you say you have about a thousand people in your R&D organization, but remind me, how many people did it take to build this product?

**Eddie Kim** (4:04)
Gusto Cofounder was primarily built by five folks, myself, three engineers, I count myself as an engineer, so four engineers and one designer. So we had one designer and four engineers, and we built it over the course of 10 weeks from initial idea, zero code, to 10 weeks chipping it to a tier one launch at Gusto.