The Hashi Stack Solved Moving Infrastructure

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. If you're looking for brief takeaways, see 9 of my main ones here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mitchell-hashimoto — *Brought to you by our season partners:* • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. http://statsig.com/pragmatic • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review. https://www.sonarsource.com/pragmatic/?utm_medium=paid&utm_source=pragmaticengineer&ut[…]egory=Paid&s_source=Paid%20Other&s_origin=pragmaticengineer • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. https://workos.com/ — *The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:* • AI Engineering in the real world https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-engineering-in-the-real-world • The AI Engineering stack https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-ai-engineering-stack • Pressure on commercial open source to make more money – and HashiCorp changing its license https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-64 • How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah — *Where to find Mitchell Hashimoto:* • X: https://x.com/mitchellh • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mitchellh • Website: https://mitchellh.com • Ghostty: https://ghostty.org • How Mitchell adopted AI: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey — *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Intro (07:19) HashiCorp origins (15:52) Early cloud computing (18:22) The 2010s startup scene in SF (23:11) Funding HashiCorp (25:23) The "Hashi stack" (35:28) An early failure in commercialization (38:28) The open-core pivot (48:08) Taking HashiCorp public (51:58) The almost-VMware acquisition (59:10) Mitchell’s take on AWS, GCP and Azure (1:06:02) AI’s impact on open source (1:07:00) Ghostty (1:19:13) How Mitchell uses AI (1:28:36) Open source + AI (1:31:46) The problem of Git and monorepos (1:39:57) Mitchell’s hiring practices (1:47:52) Mitchell’s AI adoption journey (1:50:41) Advice to future founders (1:53:20) What’s changing for software engineers (1:55:03) Closing — See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.