310 - Mitchell Hashimoto on Ghostty & His Agentic Coding Workflow

**Kaushik Gopal** (0:05)
Welcome to Fragmented, an AI Developer Podcast that helps Vibe Coders become software engineers one episode at a time. I'm your host, Kaushik.

**Iury Souza** (0:14)
And I'm Iury, the other host of Fragmented, where I'd love to talk about using AI to make you a better developer.

**Kaushik Gopal** (0:20)
Mitchell Hashimoto is a living legend in the world of DevOps. He co-founded a company called HashiCorp. If you've ever used Vagrant, basically the most common OS virtualization tool out there, that's HashiCorp. If you talk to your colleagues over at the Infra Department, you'll probably hear them talk about this service called Terraform, one of the most common tools used for maintaining infrastructure deployments. Well, that's again a product of HashiCorp and what Mitchell built. If you work at a medium or large sized company that runs anything on the Cloud, there's a good chance you're using HashiCorp's tools and what Mitchell built there.
And those are just some of the popular ones I've used and can remember. There's a whole bunch more. But perhaps most of our listeners are Fragmented and most of the kids getting into AI development today know him from something else entirely. Mitchell sold HashiCorp to IBM and instead of just riding off into the sunset, he rolled up his sleeves and built what is probably the most current and coolest, I must say, terminal apps today. It's an absolute honor to open our AI Guest Series with the one and only Mitchell Hashimoto. Thank you for joining us today, Mitchell.

**Mitchell Hashimoto** (1:37)
Thanks. Thanks. I didn't know I was your first on this. So that's exciting.

**Iury Souza** (1:41)
Cool. Yeah.

**Kaushik Gopal** (1:41)
It's the first in the AI series.

**Mitchell Hashimoto** (1:43)
The AI, right.

**Kaushik Gopal** (1:44)
I have to open up by saying, Mitchell, Ghosty is probably my second most used app period, after my browser. My browser is the only thing you haven't beaten just yet.

**Iury Souza** (1:54)
Yeah.

**Mitchell Hashimoto** (1:55)
We won't.

**Iury Souza** (1:55)
We won't.

**Kaushik Gopal** (1:56)
But in your words, why should I use Ghosty? Mac OS has terminal, I'm sure, Windows has PowerShell, Linux has some built-in terminal that work well. What is it about Ghosty that makes you feel like people should give it a shot?

**Mitchell Hashimoto** (2:10)
Yeah. Okay. So I think it's important to frame the fact that I started Ghosty for myself and not to solve what I was looking for and not thinking from the angle of what's going to get the most downloads.
And so from that angle for myself, what I really wanted was, I wanted something that worked on Mac and Linux because I worked like 50, 50, 60, 40 on Mac and Linux. I split time. I wanted something that felt native on both of those. It's like I wanted something that felt like a beautiful, polished Mac OS app and the Apple ecosystem on Mac. And I wanted something that felt like it was built for my desktop environment on Linux. And then I wanted it to be fast. I think, you know, those three, I think that existing terminals are a pick two of those things. So, for example, I think Kitty is an excellent terminal. Like whenever someone says they're using Kitty, I'm not sad about that at all. I'm like, cool, that sounds really good. But, you know, it's not native at all, right? Like if you create a tab, it's some weird, like, ASCII pixelated thing. And native goes far beyond that. Like, Ghosty on Apple Mac has Apple script integration, Apple shortcuts integration. I want to do some form of iCloud syncing. Like native, to me, the definition of native is you should be taking full advantage of whatever platform primitives you're running on. So that's sort of the thinking is Kitty is fast and it's cross-platform, but it's not native. Terminal is just one of those things. It's nothing, you know, so on and so forth. So that was my motivating factor. And for people today that are adopting it, I love getting feedback. I get a lot of people that will say, oh, you built a Mac app first, or you built a Linux app first. I mean, the fact that people can't tell means that we're doing the native thing really well. For the record, the Linux app was first, so.

**Kaushik Gopal** (4:02)
No way, I didn't know that.

**Mitchell Hashimoto** (4:03)
Yeah, yeah, we didn't have a Mac app for over a year at all. The speed, you know, people always say, I've never felt my terminal slow. And it's just one of those things where it's like, it's because you've never tried one that's fast. And so, in the sense that if you think that all cars go, you know, 20 miles per hour, you're going to be like, I get to my place is fine. And then you like get in a car that goes six miles per hour. And you're like, okay, that's pretty nice. I noticed that. And I've heard very consistently that people adopt Ghosty and they're pleasantly surprised how much the speed impacts their day to day.