Terminal Fever

In 2010, a college student wrote a piece of code that would help him start a company. Thirteen years later, he would walk away from a multi-billion-dollar public company he built, only to start tinkering with something new that could reshape how developers work.

Mitchell Hashimoto’s journey is not just another Silicon Valley success story. It’s a testament to seeing patterns others miss and having the patience to let good ideas emerge naturally. At 21, while still in college, Hashimoto created Vagrant, a tool designed to help developers create and manage portable development environments.

Vagrant soon became the talk of the tech world, and two years later, Hashimoto and his co-founder Armon Dadgar established HashiCorp, a company that would go on to revolutionize how businesses manage cloud infrastructure.

HashiCorp was ahead of its time, anticipating the massive shift in how cloud computing would manifest. The company grew rapidly, went public, and became a cornerstone of modern cloud infrastructure. Then in 2023, at an age when many founders are still struggling to find their footing, Hashimoto did something unexpected: he stepped away from the company he built.

But he wasn’t done innovating. For some time he had been tinkering with “terminal.” He quietly started to work on his latest project: Ghostty, a terminal emulator that at first glance might seem simple but represents something much more significant.

“I started the project in 2022 merely as a way to play with Zig, do some graphics programming, and deepen my understanding of terminals,” Hashimoto wrote on his blog. “I never intended to release it. I didn’t think there was innovation to be had.”

Those words might sound familiar to anyone who followed Hashimoto’s career. Just as Vagrant started as a way to solve something he needed to solve for himself, before evolving into something transformative, Ghostty began as exploration but is emerging as something more fundamental.

In an era where artificial intelligence is reshaping software development, Hashimoto’s focus on the terminal, the fundamental interface between developers and their machines, might seem counterintuitive. But that’s exactly what makes it worth paying attention to.

For developers, the terminal is “one of the few programs programmers often live in all day every day,” Hashimoto explained. Most terminals force users to choose between speed, features, and native integration. Ghostty aims to deliver all three.

Mitchell Hashimoto’s next chapter made me think about the entire developer tool stack, especially in the age of AI, and led to my latest article.

If you are interested, continue reading A window into the AI (code) world, over on CrazyStupidTech, and explore how “terminals” fit into the broader revolution happening in developer tools, as AI transforms how we write and think about code.