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.
If you’re looking for an open-source alternative, I’m the creator of woltspace [0], which is a way of coordinating your wolts (coding agents) by letting them talk to each other and giving them a lodge on your machine.
I built it for myself as a dev who loves tmux and vim and who was very unsatisfied with the typical agent orchestration experience. You should check it out! The biggest advantage is you bring your coding agents to woltspace, not the other way around.
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.
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!
(disclosure: I'm a founder of yet another T3/Conductor competitor, https://boxes.dev)
You might want to do a quick eval of all the products in the space vs your org's needs! There are a lot of options now, and T3 isn't really a drop-in replacement for Conductor if you wanted the cloud setup.
Specifically T3's great for local, but for cloud they don't host anything - you just run their server on your own machine / VM. Which works ok, esp if you prefer full self-hosted, but then parallel agents still share a machine and need worktrees for isolation. Conductor Cloud actually eliminated worktrees by giving each workspace its own VM with a dev environment preloaded - which is the same approach we (and a few others) are taking.
Also you're not mentioning that Boxes is not open-source, where as T3 is. They just had to leave Conductor essentially because it was an acquihire of a closed source offering. I think if we're to stay safe in an environment that's moving this fast: we do need the code so that we can continue using it in case of these M&A's.
Also - if you are a developer/SWE this 'keep your laptop closed' thing with these control planes is mostly hype. I'd place my bets on something like Rex (https://www.superlogical.com/) instead.
If you’re interested in self hosting your own, I’m the creator of woltspace [0], it’s a fully open-source way of managing your team of coding agents (wolts). You give the wolts a lodge on your own infra. They’re always on, always reachable, and fun beavers and racoons that evolve over time. Happy to chat about it! It’s by far my favourite workflow as a dev who loves tmux and being in a terminal
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.
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.
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'.
(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.
Thank you, and other sellouts, for reinforcing my view to build my own development and deployment stack and not rely on some third party that does a rug pull
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.
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!
im so curious what specifically makes this possible. I have no experience with conductor but your comment reminds me of how impressed I was with the development speed of parse.com. I'm likely dating myself; it was the first serverless/firebase backend concept that supported mobile app development. I wasn't even a user I just noted how prolific the feature rollouts were. So polished too. They got acqui-hired by Meta and I'm sure the founders did well.
Anyway, for anyone reading, just a not developer-led products. How do they do it?!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
woahhhh congrats to the conductor team! If folks are looking for cloud agents, can't recommend boxes.dev enough, they've got phenomenal support and ship INCREDIBLY fast.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadThey ruin innovation top down and bottom up at the same time
I built it for myself as a dev who loves tmux and vim and who was very unsatisfied with the typical agent orchestration experience. You should check it out! The biggest advantage is you bring your coding agents to woltspace, not the other way around.
[0] https://github.com/jerpint/woltspace
And today we're doing a refund + moving the org to t3.codes instead.
Boo Meta. Boooooooo.
You might want to do a quick eval of all the products in the space vs your org's needs! There are a lot of options now, and T3 isn't really a drop-in replacement for Conductor if you wanted the cloud setup.
Specifically T3's great for local, but for cloud they don't host anything - you just run their server on your own machine / VM. Which works ok, esp if you prefer full self-hosted, but then parallel agents still share a machine and need worktrees for isolation. Conductor Cloud actually eliminated worktrees by giving each workspace its own VM with a dev environment preloaded - which is the same approach we (and a few others) are taking.
Also - if you are a developer/SWE this 'keep your laptop closed' thing with these control planes is mostly hype. I'd place my bets on something like Rex (https://www.superlogical.com/) instead.
[0] https://github.com/jerpint/woltspace
I'll prolly have claude reverse engineer conductor over the next month so the show can go on ...
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 agent hours in its direction.
https://github.com/jahala/conducted
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.
The whole team is around to help answer any questions. You can reach out to me personally at charlie [at] melty.sh.
Why did you 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'.
Users chose them knowing full well the risks.
Build a product with paid customers, then you can choose not to sell out.
And thanks for the projection. I have a product with paid customers and I refuse to sell out. The project sinks with me.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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!
This made me laugh. The world is different now. Congrats!
Congratulations, getting an exit in a bit over a year is very very good
(I wonder if they stole that idea from my logs…)
Consider Open Sourcing the core/app
Anyway, for anyone reading, just a not developer-led products. How do they do 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.
- 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
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.
Thank you for your consideration and for your work.
If a dev is only going to choose one, I'd much rather they ship an AppImage.
https://www.superlogical.com/rex
I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.
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.
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
We like the web + mobile app orientation (available without an app store!) along with the high degree of control.
Anyone moved between Paseo and T3? Curious to hear what motivated you in either direction.
Would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative with Conductor shutting down.