Mitchell Hashimoto’s new way of writing code
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How has the day-to-day workflow of Mitchell Hashimoto changed, thanks to AI tools?
Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the most influential infrastructure engineers of our time, and is one of the most pragmatic builders I’ve met. He is the co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty. In this episode, we talk about how he got into software engineering, the history of HashiCorp, and the challenges of turning widely used open-source tools into a durable business. We also go into what it’s really like to work with AWS, Azure and GCP as a startup.
Mitchell shares how he uses AI these days, and how agents have completely changed how he works. We touch on Ghostty, open source, and what’s changing for software engineers and founders in an AI-native era.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:03) Mitchell’s path into software engineering
(07:19) The origins of HashiCorp
(15:52) Early cloud computing
(18:22) The 2010s startup scene in SF
(23:11) Funding HashiCorp
(25:23) The Hashi stack
(32:33) Why HashiCorp’s business lagged behind its technology
(35:28) An early failure in commercialization
(38:28) The open-core pivot and path to enterprise profitability
(48:08) Taking HashiCorp public
(51:58) The near VMware acquisition
(59:10) Mitchell’s take on all the cloud providers
(1:06:02) AI’s impact on open source
(1:07:00) Why Mitchell built Ghostty
(1:09:11) Why Mitchell used Zig
(1:10:38) How terminals work and Ghostty’s approach
(1:17:31) AI’s impact on terminals and libghostty
(1:19:13) How Mitchell uses AI
(1:22:02) Ghostty’s evolving AI use policy
(1:28:36) Why open source must change
(1:31:46) The problem of Git in monorepos
(1:36:22) What needs to change to work effectively with AI
(1:39:57) Mitchell’s hiring practices
(1:47:52) Mitchell’s AI adoption journey
(1:50:41) Advice to would-be founders
(1:52:21) Mitchell’s advising work
(1:53:20) What’s changing for software engineers
(1:55:03) How Mitchell recharges
(1:55:50) Book recommendation
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• AI Engineering in the real world
• The AI Engineering stack
• Pressure on commercial open source to make more money – and HashiCorp changing its license
• How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman
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We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
Mitchell Hashimoto joins the show to discuss Ghostty, the newest terminal in town. Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp, took it all the way to IPO, exited in 2023—and now he’s working on a terminal emulator called Ghostty. Ghostty is set to 1.0 this month, so we sat down to talk through all the details.
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Featuring:
Mitchell Hashimoto – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
First episode with Mitchell Hashimoto! Changelog Interviews #72: Vagrant and virtualized environments
Ghostty 1.0 is Coming and more at Ghostty 👻.
Zig - Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software.
Warp
Changelog & Friends #53: There’s a TUI for that
Changelog Interviews #511: The terminal as a platform
Changelog Interviews #555: Back to the terminal of the future
Michael Flarup runs Pixel Resort and created the Ghostty icon
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Moving from CEO back to IC: A chat with Mitchell Hashimoto on his love for code
Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)
Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.
Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.
Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Episode 67: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Mitchell Hashimoto
About Mitchell Hashimoto
Mitchell Hashimoto is Founder and CTO of HashiCorp. He is the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault and Nomad - a set of open source tools that each individually are downloaded and used millions of times per year. At one point Mitchell was in the top 5 most active users on GitHub. At HashiCorp, Mitchell is helping define a remote-first culture with over 500 employees spanning dozens of countries. He loves open source, automation, and working from home.
Links Referenced:
Twitter: @MitchellH
Otto, Vagrant, Automation (Interview)
Mitchell Hashimoto joined the show to talk about HashiCorp’s new tool - Otto, how it compares to and compliments Vagrant, Automation, and we even talked to Mitchell about his history with software development in the beginning of the show.
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Featuring:
Mitchell Hashimoto – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
HashiCorp
The Changelog #72: Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto
The Changelog #88: Vagrant, HashiCorp and Beyond with Mitchell Hashimoto
A 25-Year-Old Coding Genius Was Making $500,000 A Year In College, And He Just Raised $10 Million For A Startup
Otto - Development and Deployment Made Easy
Otto Announcement
Otto, The Successor to Vagrant
Getting Started with Otto
Otto vs. Vagrant
Vagrant
Vagrant + VMware
The Changelog #163: Go in the Modern Enterprise Using gokit with Peter Bourgon
HashiConf
sysdig
InfluxDB
The Changelog #168: Prometheus and Service Monitoring with Julius Volz from SoundCloud
The Changelog #170: BoltDB, InfluxDB and more with Ben Johnson
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Vagrant and HashiCorp (Interview)
Adam Stacoviak and Andrew Thorp talk with Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant and founder of HashiCorp.
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Featuring:
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Andrew Thorp – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
New intro music! Tell us what you think on Twitter.
We’re joined by Mitchell Hashimoto of Vagrant
Mitchell joined us in a past episode, but has since formed HashiCorp to work on Vagrant full time.
The Common Desk is a neat co-working space in Deep Ellum of Dallas, TX.
Discourse is an open source discussion platform we covered in a previous episode
SCaLE is a Linux Expo in Southern California.
Disqus is a discussion platform to integrate comments into your website.
Some of the original names of Vagrant were BoxCutter and Hobo.
vagrant-lxc is an LXC provider for Vagrant.
vagrant-joyent is a Joyent provider for Vagrant.
vagrant-kvm is a KVM provider for Vagrant.
Chef and Puppet are two products that help automate infrastructure.
Vagrant is sponsored by Fastly, Kiip, SoftLayer and Typekit.
Riak is an open source, distributed database by basho
HashiCorp will be releasing a new project, Packer. Watch HashiCorp’s Website for updates.
Hyper-V is Windows Virtualization that ships with Windows 8.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Vagrant and virtualized environments (Interview)
Wynn caught up with Mitchell Hashimoto from the Vagrant project to talk about virtualized environments, DevOps, and more.
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Featuring:
Mitchell Hashimoto – Website, GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
We’re now @TheChangelog on Twitter.
Mitchell Hashimoto from Vagrant.
Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments by providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox.
Vagrant is currently a Ruby gem.
Mitchell uses Vagrant to test his Chef cookbooks, featured in Episode 0.3.8.
Travis CI uses Vagrant extensively.
Show Travis some love, tell ‘em to come on The Changelog.
Mitchell just returned from FOSDEM.
John Bender has helped out Mitchell with Vagrant.
VeeWee: the tool to easily build vagrant base boxes or KVM, VirtualBox, and Fusion images.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
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