Conductor is joining Meta

Posted by kenrose 7 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by Charlieholtz 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by kylecazar 3 hours ago

"... many lifetimes ago in 2025"

This made me laugh. The world is different now. Congrats!

Comment by jahala 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by breznev 6 hours ago

What value could they possibly provide Anthropic? This is by far the best-case scenario for the team

Comment by jahala 5 hours ago

A great, stable product - that doesn't try to be absolutely everything - but does a few things really well, and looks great while doing it?

Comment by ipaddr 1 hour ago

That's not Anthropic.

Comment by temp123477 3 hours ago

You lads... I remember when we had to paste the code from the chat window into VSCode.

Comment by jasonjmcghee 19 minutes ago

Congrats Charlie!

Comment by 999900000999 3 hours ago

Are you going to retire now and start a band ?

Congratulations, getting an exit in a bit over a year is very very good

Comment by adam-eclse 5 hours ago

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!

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by Swalden123 6 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by iamunr 6 hours ago

Literally just went to go "all in" on conductor yesterday, and buy into their cloud setup and hope the company keeps going.

And today we're doing a refund + moving the org to t3.codes instead.

Boo Meta. Boooooooo.

Comment by paaloeye 6 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by sgallant 6 hours ago

Theo's awesome!

Comment by Handy-Man 6 hours ago

He is just annoying, otherwise he is fine.

Comment by frde_me 3 hours ago

As annoying as he can be, t3 code really speaks for itself, especially with the later updates

Comment by qsfp28 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by markerz 6 hours ago

Things will shut down over the next few months. https://www.conductor.build/announcement:

    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.
Flashback to Cloudflare acquiring Deno and hiding the shutdown at the bottom of their announcement -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019911.

Comment by fn-mote 1 minute ago

Months? More like weeks.

Comment by bqsile 4 hours ago

I switched to T3 codes a few weeks ago after being a power user of Conductor and I understand why the product felt a bit stale now.

Comment by stevenou 6 hours ago

Extremely bummed about this. Having cloud webhooks + workspace/session API + isolated VMs has been a massive productivity boost for me.

Does anyone have suggestions for products that can match Conductor Cloud, not just Conductor Local?

Comment by boudra 4 minutes ago

give https://paseo.sh a go, self host it to get many of the same features and more

Comment by dregitsky 3 hours ago

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

Comment by stevenou 1 hour ago

Trying this out... based on Claude's assessment it's got the fullest support for my existing workflow requirements compared to some of the others ones suggested.

Comment by dregitsky 10 minutes ago

Awesome, thanks a ton for trying it! Definitely reach out of you hit any issues or have feedback, email is drew at boxes.dev

Comment by ibrahima 1 hour ago

We've been building https://www.superconductor.com/ since before Conductor had cloud (actually, technically before Conductor was released, so the naming is a funny coincidence). Our team's been working together for over a decade across multiple startups (and one prior exit) and we put pride into building an excellent multiplayer, multi-surface, mobile-friendly experience so teams can work together with agents anywhere on any project. Give us a look and let us know how it goes!

Comment by nwparker 3 hours ago

Orca dev here! I'd suggest Orca

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

Comment by hoakiet98 4 hours ago

Paradev founder here, our cloud workspaces should cover most of that https://paradev.com

Comment by 217 6 hours ago

I'd say tern or orca, some customization and a decent vps will get you 95%+ of the way there

Comment by TheGamerUncle 6 hours ago

superset.sh is quite a good option that will mostly get you there.

Comment by phildenhoff 6 hours ago

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!

Comment by green-frog-445 5 hours ago

why use a 3rd party tool instead of just spinning up a VM in GCP and calling it a day? Would really appreciate your insight

Comment by phildenhoff 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by paultannenbaum 6 hours ago

Heavy conductor user here. Does the hacker news community have any suggestions for replacements?

Comment by twalla 3 hours ago

there are so many and I'm sure something has changed since I last checked but:

- 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

Comment by nwparker 3 hours ago

https://orca.dev I think it's probably the easiest switch (Conductor imports).

I work on Orca and we're shipping frequently.

Let us know if you have feedback! (MIT OSS)

Comment by mchusma 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by nwparker 2 hours ago

If you make a GH issues for your connection problem we can also probably get to the bottom of it!

Comment by j1mc 55 minutes ago

appImage is not a great packaging format for Linux. Any chance you could ship a flatpak instead? You'd likely need to host your own flatpak remote, but it's not rocket surgery.

Thank you for your consideration and for your work.

Comment by bgnm2000 16 minutes ago

highly recommend https://www.scape.work - it's unlimited agents in parallel, and unlimited orchestrators in parallel.

Comment by 2001zhaozhao 6 hours ago

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)

Comment by isege 6 hours ago

I second this. T3 code especially for remote machine workflows is unmatched.

Comment by t1ll 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by wslh 2 hours ago

Does Podium support Gemini?

Comment by FriendlyMike 3 hours ago

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

Comment by FriendlyMike 2 hours ago

Founder demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pghD8n_Prw4 :-)

Comment by davecyen 2 hours ago

I use Paradev (https://paradev.com - previously Superset) and it's great. They posted a migration guide today https://docs.paradev.com/migrate-from-conductor

Comment by hmokiguess 6 hours ago

https://herdr.dev/

Comment by doomspork 2 hours ago

https://utensils.io/claudette/

Comment by fumplethumb 3 hours ago

https://ampcode.com/ is amazing! Surprised the community here does not discuss it more.

Comment by gateauxd 2 hours ago

I like using https://paradev.com/

Comment by mickeyp 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by feverishaaron 4 hours ago

Agentastic is great for mac users. I'm hoping the project gets a boost with this acquistion.

Comment by fabioz 6 hours ago

Check Beolis (https://beolis.com).

Disclaimer: I'm developing it.

Comment by hoakiet98 4 hours ago

I'm obviously biased but Paradev, it imports your Conductor worktrees as is https://paradev.com

Comment by harryck9 6 hours ago

Paseo is great

Comment by 217 6 hours ago

tern or orca or bb or vanilla claude code desktop / codex desktop

Comment by 0xb0565e486 6 hours ago

Claude or ChatGPT

Comment by jl35db 5 hours ago

boxes.dev!

Comment by fabianlindfors 5 hours ago

getbb.app

Comment by skorobogatko 3 hours ago

buzzpot.app :)

Comment by priyadarshy 6 hours ago

macro.land

Comment by jahala 6 hours ago

Conductor is awesome. Meta sucks donkey balls, and I refuse to use their products.

I'll prolly have claude reverse engineer conductor over the next month so the show can go on ...

Comment by robertn702 6 hours ago

There’s no need to. There are so many alternatives with almost the same feature set like superset.sh and orca.dev.

Comment by roopakv 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by jahala 3 hours ago

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.

https://github.com/jahala/conducted

Comment by stryakr 3 hours ago

do you work at boxes.dev

Comment by roopakv 48 minutes ago

Nope, completely different space and zero affiliation. Which either means it's really that good, or that I need to start charging consulting fees.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by mickeyp 5 hours ago

Save tokens and spend them on building cool stuff instead. If you're open to it, give my dreamcoder.ai harness a whirl.

Comment by feverishaaron 4 hours ago

Agentastic is already pretty close in concept. Why not help improve it?

Comment by mikigraf 6 hours ago

Been using superset for some time, but they dont have the cloud offering yet..

Comment by hoakiet98 4 hours ago

We have cloud now! also renamed to Paradev https://paradev.com

Comment by fabianlindfors 5 hours ago

I migrated off Conductor to getbb.app a while ago and can highly recommend it.

For cloud agents I just built plugins in bb for boat.dev and smolmachines.com. Works like a charm.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by gosen 6 hours ago

Glad for the team, sad for the product

Comment by mgw 4 hours ago

Congrats to the team! It's great to see acquisitions in this space.

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.

Comment by jahala 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by forthwall 6 hours ago

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!

Comment by Destiner 40 minutes ago

I am pretty sure Conductor supported BYOAI since day 1. The monetization play was to charge on cloud boxes, not inference.

Comment by calmworm 1 hour ago

Dang… I didn’t even get a chance to try it.

Comment by Raed667 3 hours ago

I'm not a Conductor user, but the shutdown timeline seems rather rushed no?

Comment by dgritsko 3 hours ago

That's the consensus on the Discord server, people are not happy.

Comment by leofree 6 hours ago

Might be a dumb question but can you explain in a couple words the benefit VS a well organized claude code CLI that knows to spin sub agents?

Comment by 6thbit 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by adam-eclse 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by leofree 4 hours ago

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?

Comment by adam-eclse 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by Strongbad536 4 hours ago

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!

Comment by dbmikus 4 hours ago

Are you using Tailscale for your network, or something else?

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.

Comment by BowBun 6 hours ago

Gah this sucks! Conductor is my main development tool. Now I'm forced to look for alternatives. Why can't they open source it?

Comment by Philip-J-Fry 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by freedomben 6 hours ago

Over the years I've gotten extremely conservative with adopting any new tooling into my workflow, for exactly reasons like this.

Comment by redanddead 3 hours ago

Trusts suck

They ruin innovation top down and bottom up at the same time

Comment by paaloeye 6 hours ago

With labs spending their fundings left and right and vibe-coding, it's absolutely irresponsible to adopt anything less than 18 months old.

Comment by trcf23 6 hours ago

Not tried it yet but DeltaDB from ZED (and ZED editor more generally) could cover it for you and they are open source.

Comment by mfe7 6 hours ago

I switched to paseo.sh several months ago. It's just as good if not better.

Comment by techmunky 6 hours ago

respectfully, its a claude wrapper. with that said if you really can't live without it-- you have the binary, you know what to do.

Comment by maherbeg 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by ayayronf 7 hours ago

Congrats to the conductor team! The timeline to migrate off Conductor Cloud feels very aggressive. What tooling are other folks moving to?

Comment by mksadoughi 42 minutes ago

For what it's worth, I'm using plain Claude Code: one git worktree per session, the sessions messaging each other directly, and one coordinator session that assigns the work. To be honest, it fills the multi-agent gap pretty well. It's not as polished as Conductor, but given how much Claude Code itself has improved over the last few months, and where it's heading, I think it's a good alternative to just stick with.

Comment by creativeembassy 4 hours ago

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...)

https://paseo.sh/

Comment by askedrelic 6 hours ago

Orca is next for me to trial https://www.onorca.dev/

Herdr has been another YC favorite https://herdr.dev/

Comment by pbjerkeseth 4 hours ago

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/

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).

Comment by sbarre 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by nwparker 3 hours ago

Hey, if you have issues please let us know!

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

Comment by ashiban 3 hours ago

We're building Datadog Studio[0], for both building things, but also following them through to prod

[0] https://www.projectcodename.dev/access

Comment by fabianlindfors 5 hours ago

I moved to getbb.app. Been really happy with it for the past few months. The plugin functionality is really cool.

Comment by dgritsko 6 hours ago

T3 Code here, I've been a hardcore user of Conductor for a while but T3 is excellent.

Comment by hoakiet98 4 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mushufasa 4 hours ago

I first thought it was about this Conductor: https://github.com/netflix/conductor

Comment by babelfish 7 hours ago

Congrats to the team, but bummed out that I'm losing my favorite IDE!

Comment by SethSchilbe 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by SethSchilbe 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by cantalopes 2 hours ago

Why does their page sound like donald trump

Comment by vadepaysa 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by gdulli 6 hours ago

Everything you add to your tech stack is a liability. Period. I've always leaned minimalist.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by gepeake 6 hours ago

Glad I started migrating all my projects to Paseo yesterday!

Comment by paaloeye 6 hours ago

I'm so glad I haven't even heard of them

Comment by imagetic 2 hours ago

The end.

Comment by stevage 2 hours ago

> If you liked Conductor, you’re gonna love what’s coming.

...

> 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!

Comment by 217 5 hours ago

I will miss it dearly.

Comment by qmr 1 hour ago

"Our incredible journey"

Comment by inshard 4 hours ago

Doesn’t Claude desktop do all of this and more. Like, is this IP layer super commoditized?

Comment by cute_boi 6 hours ago

T3 code is much better than conductor.

I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by oxfordmale 3 hours ago

Condoleances

Comment by rsamtravis 3 hours ago

FUCK

Comment by jader201 4 hours ago

[dupe] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369840

Comment by ChrisArchitect 5 hours ago

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369840

Comment by dayone1 6 hours ago

why sellout your company and your customers and community?

Comment by 0c3ca83 2 hours ago

For money.

Comment by usern20260720 2 hours ago

Like Brian Acton did with the victims he allured to his platform back in the days. Sold them for 20 billion meta coins

Comment by williamdclt 5 hours ago

(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.

Comment by doublerabbit 6 hours ago

> The whole team is around to help answer any questions

Why did you sell out?

Comment by adam-eclse 5 hours ago

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'.

Comment by signatoremo 2 hours ago

Why do you think they sell out? What is it about the deal that you aren’t happy about?

Users chose them knowing full well the risks.

Build a product with paid customers, then you can choose not to sell out.

Comment by xenospn 2 hours ago

Are you asking people why they like money? like, a lot of money?

Comment by 2001zhaozhao 6 hours ago

$

Comment by FriendlyMike 5 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by FriendlyMike 2 hours ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pghD8n_Prw4 adding Conductor import tonight! We are cloud hosted but I think I can migrate y'alls git state quickly

Comment by burger_moon 3 hours ago

Appropriate user name too.

Comment by jmdelatorre 3 hours ago

rooting for you!

Comment by platevoltage 5 hours ago

I'm routing for you.

Comment by FriendlyMike 3 hours ago

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

Comment by ellievic221 5 hours ago

thank you for this!

Comment by logotype 5 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dang 3 hours ago

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html