Mitchell Hashimoto co-founded HashiCorp, built some of the most impressive DevOps tools like Vagrant and Terraform, sold the company to IBM — and then built a terminal. Ghostty is now where a huge chunk of agentic coding actually happens. Mitchell was an AI skeptic. We walk through his six-step adoption framework and the workflows he uses day to day — warm-start research, Hail Mary prompts across twenty GitHub issues, and knowing when to let the agent slam dunk it.
Show Notes #
Ghostty #
- Ghostty - Mitchell’s fast, native terminal built for platform integration across Mac and Linux
- Terminal shells
- SSH - secure shell
- PTY - pseudoterminals
- Terminal Multiplexers
- tmux - most popular open source one
- XTGETTCAP by xterm
- libghostty - the cross-platform terminal emulation library that powers Ghostty’s core
- xterm-js - powers terminal for apps like VSCode and the cloud
- Jedi Term - Intellij’s embedded terminal
- Ghostty is now a non-profit
- cmux - native macOS terminal multiplexer built on libghostty — a fork Mitchell champions
- Free Software Definition -
the 4 essential freedoms
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
- Mitchell’s tweet on unsolicited PRs and transfer of ownership
The AI Adoption Journey #
- My AI Adoption Journey - Mitchell’s blog post outlining his five-step framework
- Step 1: Drop the Chatbot
- Episode 301 - AI Coding ladder - Different stages of AI adoption
- Step 2: Reproduce Your Own Work
- Step 3: End-of-Day Agents
- OpenAI Deep Research - kick off research tasks for a “warm start” the next morning
- Spine AI research - deep research tool for longer, hour-long analysis tasks
- Step 4: Outsource the Slam Dunks
- Step 5: Engineer the Harness
- Episode 307 - Harness Engineering - Fragmented’s deep dive on harness engineering, heavily inspired by Mitchell’s post
- Step 6: Always have an Agent running
- Peter Steinberger
- Codex plugin for Claude Code
Get in touch #
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We want to hear all the feedback: what’s working, what’s not, topics you’d like to hear more on.
Co-hosts: #
We transitioned from Android development to AI starting with
Ep. #300. Listen to that episode for the full story behind our new direction.