Advice to founders: imagine a 10-year journey

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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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