Mitchell Hashimoto’s New Way Of Writing Code

Mitchell Hashimoto talks about how AI agents changed his engineering workflow and HashiCorp’s direction. Vagrant eliminated the hassle of setting up environments. Terraform succeeded not because it was first, but because it focused on community outreach and a good developer experience. A bundled product failed, so the company shifted to selling separate services like Vault, which saved the business. A possible VMware acquisition almost stopped Terraform. Hashimoto runs a background agent that does research, compares libraries, and checks edge cases to keep work moving. He warns that open source must move from “trust by default” to “deny by default” because AI creates a lot of noise, and says Git and GitHub need to adapt for the agentic era.