Gusto CTO Eddie Kim describes how a 5-person team built a new product line called Co-Founder in just 10 weeks using no traditional processes—no meetings, no Figma, no Jira, no tech specs—relying instead on Claude Code and a simple agent stack with Cloudflare Workers and Vercel AI SDK. He introduces the 'trash can method' of software engineering, where the low cost of writing code allows teams to freely experiment, discard, and rebuild without attachment.
Summarized by Podsumo
The team built a product line in 10 weeks with no meetings, no tech specs, no Figma, and no Jira.
Designer Katie became the top 94th percentile engineer in the org by shipping code and getting fast code reviews (median 9 minutes).
The 'trash can method' encourages building and discarding features freely because the cost of generating code is so low.
Simple stack: Cloudflare Workers + Vercel AI SDK, with no complex agent harnesses.
The product originated from a vibe-coded prototype during a 5-hour layover.
"We had no meetings, we had no tech specs, we had no Figmas, we had no Jira board. We had nothing."
"I call this the trash can method of software engineering right now, where you can actually trash all the code, start 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."
"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."