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

We had no meetings. We had no tech specs. We had no Figmas. We had no Jira board where we tracked stories or tracked work. We had nothing. We used Cloudflare Worker for the actual agent loop and Vercel AI SDK. That's it. 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. Co founder was primarily built by five, How did you all make those precious decisions that only genius product managers can make about in or out of scope, decisions that only genius product managers can make about in or out of scope, will this matter? We would build features, and we'd 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. I call this the the trash can method of software engineering right now where you can actually trash all the code, start like a slash v two 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 Vaux, 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 gonna show us how he, three engineers, and one designer completely rebuilt their app in just ten weeks. This is not a small company, and yet they're shipping like they're a start up. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Magic Patterns. Today's engineers use cursor and clawed code to shift 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 cloud code with the MagicPatterns MCP to pick up where you left off. Your eng team has their AI advantage. Make MagicPatterns yours. Try it today at magicpatterns.com/howiai. Eddie, thank you for joining How iai. I'm so excited you reached out to chat because one of my favorite themes …