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.
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/
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...)
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.
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.
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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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Interesting idea, but we find task data is too high throughput to put into git. I assume with the new crop of DVCSs that can handle much more volume this might change.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] threadHerdr has been another YC favorite https://herdr.dev/
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
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).
https://paseo.sh/
[0] https://www.projectcodename.dev/access
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!
https://hive.codes/signup
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.
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.
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.
Interesting idea, but we find task data is too high throughput to put into git. I assume with the new crop of DVCSs that can handle much more volume this might change.
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> 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!