That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo.
But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.
This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares.
Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.
I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed.
Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves.
Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.
As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc.
Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.
I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.