Hi! Co-founder here. Conductor actually kicked off with a HN post many lifetimes ago in July 2025 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594584). I owe so much to this community. Thank you all so much!
The whole team is around to help answer any questions. You can reach out to me personally at charlie [at] melty.sh.
I'm in the awkward position of wanting to congratulate you and scold you at the same time. Wish you'd been bought by Anthropic or something instead. Anyhow- congrats on getting scooped up.
Just wanted to congratulate you guys. Like many of us here, I had a mixed reaction of happy for your team, but also sad for Conductor. I tried a bunch of different approaches for coding agents, once I started using Conductor I was like "oh I guess I'm done looking for a harness" - a beautiful clean UI, great UX and just an overall smooth experience with all the features you could need.
Hopefully Meta does something good with your team's talent and technology, but regardless, it was a huge productivity boost for me and I really appreciate that. Good luck to you and your team at Meta!
(As someone who isn't particularly happy about this news)
> why sellout your company and your customers and community?
Why not? Do you think this is a heart project, that the founders have a personal passion for agent orchestration somehow? They're not curing cancer or supporting orphans, most companies are created to make money, that's how our economic system works (for better or worse, but I'm not going to blame individuals or be surprised about it).
"community"... Come on. There's customers, there's no community here.
Realistically for them, coding harnesses are an extremely competitive landscape, and they have to live in constant fear that Anthropic/OpenAI etc will rugpull them and force these harnesses to go through API billing (effectively killing it as an option for I would guess the majority of their users). That nearly happened earlier this year when Anthropic intimated they were going to do this.
The other reality is, there are now good free alternatives to Conductor (I haven't tried them so we will see) - it does suck if you feel very tied to your existing workflow, but I also think about it from the level of 'these people gave me something for free that helped me a lot, and I want things to work out well for them'.
Why not try one of the existing services before you spend time maintaining something yourself? For the past two months, I've been using boxes.dev
95% of all my sessions are on boxes. Initially, the draw was just a remote box that I could control on mobile, but some of the features they have added recently, like coordinating child sessions, are wildly good.
I know there are new startups in this space every day, so what tipped things for me was that the team is so responsive and ships features in the matter of hours.
I'll tinker with this on the side. To see "how hard can it be anyhow" and to maybe end up with something better long term.
-----
Edit:
Surprise, surprise - I'm launching a new open source project: "Conducted" (not affiliated with, or to be confused with any similar brands)
Conducted is MIT license, and will remain open source until hell has frozen over.
Looking for contributors ;) .. Feel free to give it a star, throw some agents in its direction.
We built https://boxes.dev specifically for cloud dev / isolated VMs (disclosure, I'm one of the founders). Getting work off your laptop is such a productivity boost when you have parallel threads. Obviously there are a ton of products in this category (rest of the comments here have many examples) but we're 100% focused on the cloud experience
I switched from conductor to orca because conductor didn’t support mobile app working with local instances and didn’t have a good cli/mcp at the time.
Very happy I switched. I’m extremely productive on mobile. It defiiitely feels power usery but i am one so it works great.
My only gripe is sometimes it loses connections to workspaces in a way that is hard to recover BUT the meta conductor living on top can resolve it for me. Kudos for having it.
I'm one of the founders of https://podium.do. We created Podium because none of the other ADEs worked like what we wanted. I think it could be interesting for you to checkout as an alternative because there are similarities to Conductor, plus a few interesting additional features. We are pretty strong for complex tasks because we put an agent native issue tracker at the core of architecture which turned out as a super power in that case.
I will always recommend T3 Code, it is by far the best one I have tried that isn't glued to a specific model provider. Trades blows with Codex / Claude Desktop in terms of features. All of the other multi-provider orchestrators have not been keeping up with Claude Desktop in particular adding features at lightning-speed, but T3 Code somehow manages.
(I am building my own tool in this area and I literally downloaded and tried all of them as market research)
Free 3 month sub to any current Conductor user. We promise to never sell to Facebook, X or other weirdo billionaires. I started this company to get away from working at big tech and not to sell to it. Up to 10 cloud workspaces per person, works with all the things you need.
https://hive.codes/signup
Give my dreamcoder.ai harness a whirl. Runs in your browser on all 3 platforms. Tiling window manager; generous use of keyboard shortcuts, so it's not just for mouse users.
Wednesday, Nov 4 New users can no longer sign up for Conductor or download the app.
Friday, Nov 13 Conductor Cloud goes read-only
Local Conductor will continue working as normal for now. It will start winding down in early 2027.
Congratulations to the team - but it's a bitter ending. I wish, in these cases, the company could open source a version of their desktop software. But I'm sure the tech is part of what Meta is acquiring.
I started using Conductor in January this year and it was a great tool - Charlie and the team knocked it out of the park. I only migrated to Orca when I needed better multi-machine control, and remote control, but these tools are a dime-a-dozen now. I'm not sure that if I was hunting for a new tool today that I'd pick up Orca. Maybe Herdr? or Stencil's Tern?
All that to say - they built a great product with great UX. Looking forward to seeing what they build next at Meta!
My needs (multi machine set up, one tool) do not work well with “one VM”. If I ran Claude code on one VM, I’d only have that one machines resources. I’d have to have a second session in another terminal tab which is… well that’s Herdr. And orca. They manage those.
Site looks great, congrats - will have a peek - but I feel task handling is better done in the repo itself? (repo-as-the-harness thinking) especially for teams.
The economics of these harnesses I don't think lend to many winners, the model usage plans the big guys have at offer will always undercut the small players no matter how much they try to resell an openmodel for $20/mo. Congrats to the team though!
Congrats to the team! This is a great acquire for meta to super speed their coding agent rival. It's very exciting to now have another tier 1 major player in the space.
I used conductor when it was first released for quite some time. Great product but i ultimately wanted to use my own networked devices to do work, so i moved to herdr and then ultimately to t3 code now.
Very happy to see the team get a happy ending/landing!
I had the same question. I think this is in the space of being like the 'trillian' or 'matrix' of ai agents, using multi provider coding agent from a single interface plus some bells and whistles.
But I think within claude code and codex subagent support has improved a lot lately and it doesn't seem this would improve that much over that native support if you only use one provider.
The benefit is not spinning up sub-agents, but spinning up parallel workstreams. They basically took 90% of the friction out of working with and using worktrees. I was using Linear a lot (and enjoying it!) for my issue tracking, but at some point I realized it's more productive to just create a new worktree in Conductor for any bug/feature and cut out the middleman.
hmm so working on different features let's say on the same git, in parallel, without causing issues? Is the improvement of this parallelization worth it on solo projects or it becomes only relevant on big projects with lots of PRs and such?
It's always useful to have even if you don't need 8 worktrees with agents all going at the same time (I rarely have more than 2-3 active at a time). Typically there a tension between the 'fast way' (a big ol' slop branch bag of assorted changes) and the 'correct way' (carefully isolated branches and PRs) - with a smart implementation of worktrees like Conductor, the correct way becomes just as fast. That's basically the heart of good UX in my mind.
Western AI giants have hundreds of billions of dollars to make back in a world where China is releasing open source tooling and open weights models. How else does they make their money back other than finding _something_ proprietary to sell.
I switched to Paseo a few months ago. Fully open-source, I've had no issues with it. But no cloud provider option, so to speak. (I run an instance of Paseo in a Hetzner box, agents working full-time, haven't really had to do any maintenance on it...)
If you like taking bets on smaller oss & independent projects that have no interest in creating a vc backed business, I'm working (9 months+ now) on https://ouijit.com/
FWIW I used Orca for a week and then went back to Herdr..
Orca has a lot of UI bugs, buttons that don't work, menus that don't disappear, etc.. To be fair they push updates quite regularly, but I think I will check back in once it's a bit more stable.
well, conductor was so great that after using it for a few weeks, I completely stopped fearing a lock-in. I just use the official cli + desktop apps now. tmux + a bit of custom scripting works wonders.
Tried Conductor in the past but had migrated all of our teams remote development work to http://boxes.dev as it was much more intuitive and easier to manage parallel workstreams.
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
Tried Conductor in the past but had migrated all of our teams remote development work to http://boxes.dev as it was much more intuitive and easier to manage parallel workstreams.
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
Thank you, we are pre seed and raising. Our team is ex Airbnb where we built agent harness for the last 2 years. We have a sustainable model - 20 a month gets you 10 remote concurrent machines and the full platform tool chain. You can use our ui, mcp through Claude or codex or straight up run codex and Claude server in our VMs. Every sub will be profit for us and means we don’t need to sell the company when it gets larger
Personal attacks aren't allowed here, regardless of who you're attacking. We've had to ask you this before, and even banned you in the past before agreeing to unban you. Seriously not cool.
The whole team is around to help answer any questions. You can reach out to me personally at charlie [at] melty.sh.
This made me laugh. The world is different now. Congrats!
Congratulations, getting an exit in a bit over a year is very very good
Hopefully Meta does something good with your team's talent and technology, but regardless, it was a huge productivity boost for me and I really appreciate that. Good luck to you and your team at Meta!
> why sellout your company and your customers and community?
Why not? Do you think this is a heart project, that the founders have a personal passion for agent orchestration somehow? They're not curing cancer or supporting orphans, most companies are created to make money, that's how our economic system works (for better or worse, but I'm not going to blame individuals or be surprised about it).
"community"... Come on. There's customers, there's no community here.
Why did you sell out?
Users chose them knowing full well the risks.
Build a product with paid customers, then you can choose not to sell out.
The other reality is, there are now good free alternatives to Conductor (I haven't tried them so we will see) - it does suck if you feel very tied to your existing workflow, but I also think about it from the level of 'these people gave me something for free that helped me a lot, and I want things to work out well for them'.
I'll prolly have claude reverse engineer conductor over the next month so the show can go on ...
95% of all my sessions are on boxes. Initially, the draw was just a remote box that I could control on mobile, but some of the features they have added recently, like coordinating child sessions, are wildly good.
I know there are new startups in this space every day, so what tipped things for me was that the team is so responsive and ships features in the matter of hours.
-----
Edit:
Surprise, surprise - I'm launching a new open source project: "Conducted" (not affiliated with, or to be confused with any similar brands) Conducted is MIT license, and will remain open source until hell has frozen over.
Looking for contributors ;) .. Feel free to give it a star, throw some agents in its direction.
https://github.com/jahala/conducted
For cloud agents I just built plugins in bb for boat.dev and smolmachines.com. Works like a charm.
And today we're doing a refund + moving the org to t3.codes instead.
Boo Meta. Boooooooo.
Does anyone have suggestions for products that can match Conductor Cloud, not just Conductor Local?
Why? We let you bring your own cloud (versus being locked in).
You can bring a local cloud, sandboxes, or whatever you'd like
We even launched community plugins this week for VM/sandboxes (our you can have your own internal plugin)
https://www.onorca.dev/plugins?kind=machines
I work on Orca and we're shipping frequently.
Let us know if you have feedback! (MIT OSS)
Very happy I switched. I’m extremely productive on mobile. It defiiitely feels power usery but i am one so it works great.
My only gripe is sometimes it loses connections to workspaces in a way that is hard to recover BUT the meta conductor living on top can resolve it for me. Kudos for having it.
- paseo: open, mobile app is a first class citizen, i've been happy with it
- orca: vc backed, featureful (built in ios sim, for example)
- herdr: vc backed, terminal native, im sure there are more features since i last checked it
- t3: open, never used it but folks seem to like it
(I am building my own tool in this area and I literally downloaded and tried all of them as market research)
Disclaimer: I'm developing it.
I started using Conductor in January this year and it was a great tool - Charlie and the team knocked it out of the park. I only migrated to Orca when I needed better multi-machine control, and remote control, but these tools are a dime-a-dozen now. I'm not sure that if I was hunting for a new tool today that I'd pick up Orca. Maybe Herdr? or Stencil's Tern?
All that to say - they built a great product with great UX. Looking forward to seeing what they build next at Meta!
I personally never thought Conductor was that great, so I built my own with https://podium.do.
What I was missing was a built-in task system so more complex tasks can be split up by the agents. And running agents on my own machines of course.
Very happy to see the team get a happy ending/landing!
I've been working on a startup in the "private networks + VMs for agents" space, so I'm always trying to learn how people run their current setups.
But I think within claude code and codex subagent support has improved a lot lately and it doesn't seem this would improve that much over that native support if you only use one provider.
They ruin innovation top down and bottom up at the same time
https://paseo.sh/
[0] https://www.projectcodename.dev/access
Herdr has been another YC favorite https://herdr.dev/
gh: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit
It's a bit unique from a design standpoint, but the next release brings it a little more in line with the zeitgeist (but not too much).
Orca has a lot of UI bugs, buttons that don't work, menus that don't disappear, etc.. To be fair they push updates quite regularly, but I think I will check back in once it's a bit more stable.
We test our product like crazy, so I'm quite surprised to hear this. But feel free to drop me a message, open a GH issue or otherwise.
We are OSS MIT and always open to feedback
...
> Friday, Nov 20
> Conductor Cloud shuts down
> We begin deleting Conductor Cloud user data. Please export your data before this date.
Oh yeah, gonna love that!
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html