Mitchell Hashimoto’s new way of writing code

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
If AI agents can write code, open port, request 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 its day-to-day workflow. Mitchell built the tools that power modern cloud infrastructure, Terraform and the Hashi stack. He also created the 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.
In today's episode, we cover The origin story of HashiCorp, a failed university research project, a notebook with unsolved problems, and an email from his future co-founder that he answered in 2 minutes. His honest, unfiltered take on working with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud as partners, both the arrogance and also the brilliant engineers who never thought about the business. How he's adapted to AI coding tools, why he always keeps an agent running in the background, and his practical advice for engineers who have not yet warmed up to AI agents. And many more.
If you're interested to hear from one of the most hands-on builders in the industry and want to know where AI tools are useful vs. not, then this episode is for you. This episode is presented by StatSig, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them and our other season sponsors, Sonar and WorkOS. Mitchell, welcome to the podcast. It's awesome to be here in person.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:20)
Yeah, it's cool to meet you in person after so many years of following you.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:25)
You've had such a massive impact on the tech industry, on software engineers. But how did it start?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:30)
I think the high level is the same story as a lot of people. Self-taught around 12, 13, early teens motivated by video games. Same as a lot of people. Although I really quickly realized that I liked web. Web was new, Google wasn't out yet, I think web is new.
I never became a video game programmer. I really quickly just became a web programmer, PHP, Perl, that sort of stuff. Because I was so young, the only way I could learn was through whatever code was published online. So that's how I got acquainted with open source. I didn't know that's what it was called then, but a kid with no job, no money, parents didn't want to buy professional books or like, I don't know what they are now, but they were like 50 bucks then. So they were like, no way. Also, they didn't believe I was going to read it. So there was no way they're going to buy that. So yeah, anything I find online was my in into coding. I'd walk to school every day with a group of friends. There's a period of time where I printed out the first or second chapter of the PHP manual. I remember it was about 30 to 40 pages of paper, and I never programmed. So all this stuff, and I'm 12, it's very confusing. So I read the whole 40 pages every walk to school, and I don't remember how long it took me, but I did that a long time before. I remember this one moment where I was walking to school, where suddenly I understood what these dollar sign things were. For whatever reason, it just came in. Those are variables, right? Variables, yeah.
I never heard that word before. You don't hear the word variable as a 12-year-old out in any context. Finally, at one point, it hit me that they store things, and things could change. I remember just weeks of reading this thing, and not understanding it, getting to school so excited, and it triggered. Then after that, I remember stuff happened really quickly.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:25)
What kind of stuff did you build? Websites?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:27)
Yeah, websites. It was gaming-related websites. It was a lot of game sheet stuff, forum, software. Yeah, I had a lot of fun cloning websites, and poorly, but PayPal was out. And then I really wondered, how does money get transferred over the Internet? How does that work? So I tried to build copies of cloning websites. I did masquerade as an 18-year-old on freelance websites. And so I got $100 here, $50 here to do image upload stuff. I decided to study computer science in college. I went to the University of Washington. I guess that's when you would call it serious, but I was coding every day as much as I could through high school. Oh, okay.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:12)
That's impressive. Were you alone with this when your friend grouped? There weren't other people doing it or was it kind of lonely?