Host: What was your experience back then of AWS? Your honest view.

Mitchell Hashimoto: AWS was really arrogant. Felt like they were doing us a favor. Subtle vibe of we will spin up a product and kill your company.

Host: Terraform just seemed to be everywhere. Why do you think that sudden popularity was?

Mitchell Hashimoto: One of the things that frustrated me was like, oh, they only won cuz they were first to market. We were like seventh to market.

Host: It feels like most of open source will have to change because of AI. AI makes it trivial to create plausible looking but incorrect and lowquality contributions. Open source has always been a system of trust. Now it's just default deny and you must get trust.

Host: Do you think Git will be around in a few years?

Mitchell Hashimoto: What's interesting is this is the first time in like 12 to 15 years that anyone is even asking that question without laughing. If AI agents can write code, open pull requests and ship features, do we even need open source contributors anymore? Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp, has been thinking deeply about this, the future of open source and how to efficiently integrate AI into his day-to-day workflow. Mitchell built the tools that power modern cloud infrastructure, Terraform, and the Hashi stack. He also created a popular terminal, Ghosty, and I consider him to be one of the most thoughtful voices in the industry on how AI is changing the craft of software engineering.

Host: Mitchell, welcome to the podcast. It's awesome to be here in person.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah, it's it's cool to meet you in person after so many years of following you.

Host: You've had such a massive impact on on the tech industry on software engineers, but how did it start?

Mitchell Hashimoto: I think the high level is the same story as a lot of people. I self-taught uh around 12, 13, early teens, motivated by video games. Same like same as a lot of people. Um although I really quickly realized that I liked web, you know, web was new. Google wasn't out yet. I think web was new. And so I I kind of like really quick I I never became a video game programmer. I really quickly just became a web programmer, PHP, um Pearl, that sort of stuff. And uh because I was so young, the only way I could learn was through whatever code was published online. And so that's how I got acquainted with open source.

Host: Those are variables, right?

Mitchell Hashimoto: Variables. Yeah. Yeah. And I I really understood I never heard that word before. Like you don't hear the word variable as a 12-year-old out in any context. And finally at one point it like hit me that they store things and things could change and I remember just like weeks of reading this thing and not understanding it getting to school so excited being like it it triggered and then after that I remember stuff happened really quickly.

Host: What what kind of stuff did you build?

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah, websites. It was gaming related websites. It was like a lot of like gamech stuff, forum software. Yeah, I mean I had a lot of fun cloning websites, you know, in a poorly, but like uh PayPal was out and then and I really wondered like how does money get transferred over the internet? How does that work? So I tried to build like copies of cloning websites. I decided to study computer science in college. Um went to University of Washington.

Host: Oh, okay. Yeah, that's impressive. Were you alone with this when your friend group there? Were there other people doing it or was it kind of lonely?

Mitchell Hashimoto: It was lonely. It was very lonely. It was lonely in the real world and then I quickly found online friends through like MSN Messenger and ALS Messenger and forums. The big like break that I got was I blogged and uh my freshman year, late freshman year heading into summer um after it of college, someone just emailed me out of the blue and I kind of thought it was a scam. It was just like do you want to, you know, it was do you want to be a Ruby on Rails programmer?

Host: was it a startup or small company something like that?

Mitchell Hashimoto: No, it was a consultancy. So, it's kind of like one of those standard like this like 2007 Ruby on Rails was had blown up. It was already very popular and uh there was all these consultancies that that appeared out of nowhere that was basically like we'll build your minimum viable product and yeah and we're one of those shops.

Host: How did eventually Hashi Corp start or what happened between like getting getting this this Ruby job to a few years later?

Mitchell Hashimoto: It kind of starts with this Ruby job. Um there was one guy that worked at the the company and he was my boss. He was the guy who got all these projects hosted on on dedicated servers and I didn't know anything about that. He literally said unplug he he unplug my mouse and said you're never going to work with a mouse again. So figure it out.

Host: Harsh lesson.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Harsh lesson. And once I got good with the keyboard, um he said, "Okay, here's he he installed screen on my terminal and said, "Figure this out. You're going to use this now." And as we got there then it became you know here's SSH here's a package manager he's like it slowly taught me more and more and that got me just in I loved in like immediately.

Mitchell Hashimoto: And I still have this notebook um at my house here, but the problems are really like, you know, I have no way to declaratively manage the different resources that are out there. I have no way to network these together in a private network. And I shared this with my undergraduate like boss who was Arman who was my co-founder.

Host: Y later became your co-founder.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yes. He was the my my boss on the undergrad side. And he emailed me out of the blue like, "Do you want to do a startup?" I emailed him back in 2 minutes and said, "Sure." And then uh and uh again like there's overlapping pieces here, but I was also at the time working on something called Vagrant.

Host: So this is a development environment that you could spin up quickly, right?

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The metaphor I always had was I didn't use Windows then, but the metaphor I always used was how could I doubleclick and open a dev?

Host: And you couldn't build that for the client, right? The client would only pay for the work.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah. You couldn't build that for the client. So it' be like 4 hours of work wasted. And so vagrant came out of that. I was with virtual box. Virtual box was free and open source. I didn't do EC2 cuz I I didn't have money to pay for these instances. And I think that helps create better software um when you have constraints and that was my constraint.

Host: at that moment in time when you saw cloud you know you saw it was being big did you know or have a conviction that it would be big or as big as cloud has become cuz this was very very new back then right

Mitchell Hashimoto: It just felt very raw. Um, and I never really viewed it as this is going to be big. What I viewed it as is this is the better way to do it. Um I think where I started making the bet, me and Arman both started making some kind of bet was not just when we started Hashor but we started Hashorb on the basis of like multicloud.

Host: So when you decided to start Hashi Corp, you had Vagrant like was the idea to like you know like invest in commercialized Vagrant and did you go out to raise money or did you start doing it with you know bootstrap? How did that go?

Mitchell Hashimoto: It wasn't to commercialize Vagrant. But what we had done is Arman and I both worked at this mobile ads company startup. I moved to San Francisco, found a startup that would hire me. I convinced Arman was actually going to do a PhD at Berkeley and I convinced him to join this mobile ad startup. I had these two things come together where I had some ego, some hubris where I'm like, I'm pretty sure we're building the right thing along with I think the industry is moving in that direction.

Host: And then when you decided you incorporated you know got the things did you decide to raise money?

Mitchell Hashimoto: I self-funded um I transferred $20,000 from my savings account into this corporate account. I paid myself $0 for the first 6 months. And then Arman joined after 6 months. Um and and we decided to raise. We really just wanted to go fast. So VC was the route we chose.

Host: Can you talk us through the the first several products and and what they do?

Mitchell Hashimoto: The first product that came out of Hashore itself was a product called Packer. That's an image building uh tool. The next one that came out was console. Um, console was solving the service discovery problem. Then after that, I think we did Terraform. Um, Terraform uh spins up infrastructure code. And then was vault.

Host: So it's like like well we have like our on your local developer machine you have you have like your environment variables and doing that at scale at a team level at a company level at a service services needs to access all these stuff securely.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah, it was much more focused on the like the the production environment secrets. Yeah, we were really scared when we built that actually cuz um nobody on the team that build vault had more than one quarter of security undergraduate security experience. And after travault came Nomad.

Host: And as you're building out like these, you said like some of these took years like how did the business like hash corp as a business work? Like did you did you start to generate some business?

Mitchell Hashimoto: I think we waited too long to to develop a business but um for four years there was no real reproducible growing business. So you were just building this vision of the founders vision.

Host: And for those engineers who are thinking of becoming founders or you know might might be founders, how did this work with your investors?

Mitchell Hashimoto: We had clear product market fit by the a um in terms of the open source, right? We had millions of downloads, a lot of stars on GitHub. Our first foray into commercialization was a total failure. It was this product that was called Atlas.

Mitchell Hashimoto: We had this board meeting. We drove home. our mom and I complete drive home was silent. Arman drove straight to the office. We decided, let's play this experiment where if there was no sunk cost, if we were starting from scratch, what would we do differently today? We decided over the course of that weekend to just throw it all away. We are now enterprise as our customer open core per product.

Host: One thing I I remember is Terraform just became so so so popular across the industry. Why do you think that sudden popularity was?

Mitchell Hashimoto: It's so funny to hear that because for the longest time like we were the vagrant company. For 9 years straight, I had been somewhere different at least every eight days. I wrote these scripts where I downloaded all the GitHub issues and I would just break it down into tasks that none took more than 10 to 15 minutes and I just created this list and and when I was on the plane I would just one by one bust them out.

Host: at Hashior Corp you work with all of them. What was your experience back then uh of you know like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud like like your kind of honest view of how they work back then.

Mitchell Hashimoto: AWS was really arrogant annoyingly arrogant. It always felt like they were doing us a favor at every turn. Microsoft I would I have the most positive view on Microsoft. From the business side competent um professionals and team players. And Google Cloud, it was always like the best technology. And I swear none of them, it felt like none of them cared or thought about the business at all.

Host: Seems like open source is changing a lot especially with with with AI and and you know you're seeing stuff at ghosty. What what are you seeing with with open source maintainers?

Mitchell Hashimoto: Well, I would say more broadly the issue facing open source today um is AI contributions and the specifically the ratio the signal to noise ratio being incredibly low. I had felt that I was rusty. I wanted to go to desktop. So, I picked all these like different technologies and I said, "Okay, Zig."

Host: What does a terminal actually do?

Mitchell Hashimoto: It's like a browser but for text content. The tongue-in-cheek answer I like to give to Ghosty's complexity is that it's 30% of terminal and 70% a font renderer. It's kind of like the love of the game.

Host: And just very recently you kind of crammed cracked down and said like all right no more.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah we're going to switch to a explicit vouching system for the community. So you're no longer able to open a PR at all. AI or not, don't care anymore. Now, all that matters is that another community member has vouched for you. Open source has always been a system of trust.

Host: In your workflow, do you just use a single agent? Do you use multiple agents?

Mitchell Hashimoto: I endeavor to always have an agent doing something at all times. If I'm coding, I want an agent planning. I've been calling this harness engineering. Anytime you see AI do a bad thing, try to build tooling that it could have called out to to have prevented that bad thing.

Host: What What would your first advice be for someone who's like not

Mitchell Hashimoto: My first advice would be reproducing your work with an agent. I love to just sit in bed, lights off, and I just think through like I'm writing code in my head. The best engineers are the ones that context switch the least.

Host: Awesome. Well, well, thanks so much for going through all all of these details. It was just not great to hear from how you're working.

Mitchell Hashimoto: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.