Conductor is joining Meta (conductor.build)

77 pointsby kenrose5 hours ago127 comments

Charlieholtz 4 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.

jahala 4 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.

breznev 4 hours ago

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

jahala 4 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?

doublerabbit 4 hours ago

> The whole team is around to help answer any questions

Why did you sell out?

2001zhaozhao 4 hours ago

adam-eclse 4 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'.

xenospn 24 minutes ago

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

signatoremo 23 minutes 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.

dayone1 4 hours ago

why sellout your company and your customers and community?

williamdclt 4 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.

0c3ca83 20 minutes ago

For money.

usern20260720 14 minutes ago

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

adam-eclse 4 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!

kylecazar 2 hours ago

"... many lifetimes ago in 2025"

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

999900000999 an hour 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

temp123477 an hour ago

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

jahala 4 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 ...

mikigraf 4 hours ago

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

fabianlindfors 3 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.

hoakiet98 2 hours ago

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

robertn702 4 hours ago

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

mickeyp 4 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.

feverishaaron 3 hours ago

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

roopakv 2 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.

stryakr 2 hours ago

do you work at boxes.dev

jahala 2 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

iamunr 5 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.

paaloeye 5 hours ago

[flagged]

sgallant 5 hours ago

Theo's awesome!

Handy-Man 4 hours ago

He is just annoying, otherwise he is fine.

frde_me an hour ago

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

bqsile 3 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.

stevenou 4 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?

217 4 hours ago

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

TheGamerUncle 4 hours ago

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

hoakiet98 2 hours ago

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

dregitsky an hour 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

nwparker an hour 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

paultannenbaum 4 hours ago

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

priyadarshy 4 hours ago

macro.land

harryck9 4 hours ago

Paseo is great

2001zhaozhao 4 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)

isege 4 hours ago

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

0xb0565e486 4 hours ago

Claude or ChatGPT

217 4 hours ago

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

fabioz 4 hours ago

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

Disclaimer: I'm developing it.

hmokiguess 4 hours ago

https://herdr.dev/

jl35db 4 hours ago

boxes.dev!

mickeyp 4 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.

fabianlindfors 3 hours ago

getbb.app

feverishaaron 3 hours ago

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

hoakiet98 2 hours ago

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

skorobogatko 2 hours ago

buzzpot.app :)

fumplethumb an hour ago

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

twalla an hour 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

nwparker an hour 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)

mchusma an hour 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.

nwparker an hour ago

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

FriendlyMike an hour 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

FriendlyMike 18 minutes ago

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

t1ll an hour 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.

wslh 19 minutes ago

Does Podium support Gemini?

gateauxd an hour ago

I like using https://paradev.com/

davecyen an hour 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

ball_of_lint 21 minutes ago

https://imbue.com/product/sculptor

doomspork 9 minutes ago

https://utensils.io/claudette/

markerz 5 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.

phildenhoff 5 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!

green-frog-445 3 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

phildenhoff 3 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.

mgw 2 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.

jahala 2 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.

cantalopes 32 minutes ago

Why does their page sound like donald trump

Raed667 2 hours ago

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

dgritsko 2 hours ago

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

gosen 4 hours ago

Glad for the team, sad for the product

forthwall 5 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!

maherbeg 2 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.

Strongbad536 3 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!

dbmikus 2 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.

leofree 4 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?

6thbit 4 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.

adam-eclse 3 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.

leofree 3 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?

adam-eclse an hour 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.

mushufasa 3 hours ago

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

BowBun 5 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?

freedomben 5 hours ago

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

paaloeye 4 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.

redanddead an hour ago

Trusts suck

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

trcf23 5 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.

mfe7 5 hours ago

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

Philip-J-Fry 4 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.

techmunky 4 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.

ayayronf 5 hours ago

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

askedrelic 5 hours ago

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

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

sbarre 3 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.

nwparker an hour 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

pbjerkeseth 3 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).

dgritsko 4 hours ago

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

fabianlindfors 3 hours ago

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

creativeembassy 3 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/

ashiban 2 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

imagetic 26 minutes ago

The end.

vadepaysa 2 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.

stevage 28 minutes 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!

SethSchilbe 3 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.

SethSchilbe 3 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.

babelfish 5 hours ago

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