How I AI · Monday, June 29, 2026
Gusto CTO Eddie Kim shared how the company's new 'co-founder' product line was built by a small team of five in just 10 weeks. Kim described their approach as a 'trash can method' of software engineering, where code is frequently deleted and rebuilt due to a low cost of development, enabling rapid iteration.
“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.”
“Gusto co-founder was primarily built by five folks. Myself, three engineers, I count myself as an engineer, so four engineers and one designer.”
“And we built it over the course of 10 weeks from initial idea, zero code to 10 weeks shipping it to a tier one launch at Gusto.”