Mihir Chintawar

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Mihir Chintawar
OccupationCo-founder and CTO of Random Labs
Known forCo-founding Random Labs (Y Combinator S24)

Mihir Chintawar is an Indian-American software engineer and entrepreneur, known as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Random Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous coding agents. The company was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch.[1]

Career

Chintawar co-founded Random Labs in 2024 alongside Kiran Illindala. The company develops Slate, an open-source autonomous coding agent designed to work alongside software engineers on complex, long-running tasks. Slate is installed via the npm package manager as a command-line tool and is intended to operate within a developer's existing codebase.[2]

A key technical feature of Slate is its built-in compaction algorithm, which the company describes as enabling the agent to engineer its own context. This mechanism surfaces the most relevant information at any given point during a task, allowing the agent to maintain focus over extended work sessions without degradation in output quality. Rather than employing a separate "plan mode," Slate is designed to implicitly plan by first researching a given task and then presenting its proposed approach to the user through an interactive discussion.[2]

In March 2026, Random Labs officially launched Slate V1, which was described in press coverage as the industry's first "swarm native" autonomous coding agent. The V1 release introduced a "hive mind" architecture capable of executing massively parallel engineering tasks. The system uses a "dynamic pruning algorithm" to maintain context across large codebases. When a worker thread completes a task within this swarm architecture, it returns a compressed summary rather than a full transcript, enabling efficient coordination across parallel processes. The company has positioned the tool as a collaborative assistant aimed at supporting what it calls the "next 20 million engineers," rather than as a replacement for human developers.[3]

Random Labs operates in the developer tools, open-source software, and artificial intelligence sectors. Slate has been used by teams at companies including Gravity and Prava.[2]

References

  1. "Random Labs – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Random Labs". 'Random Labs}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
  3. "Y Combinator-backed Random Labs launches Slate V1, claiming the first 'swarm-native' coding agent". 'VentureBeat}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.