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.
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.
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!
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
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.
(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'.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 ...
There’s no need to. There are so many alternatives with almost the same feature set like superset.sh and orca.dev.
Save tokens and spend them on building cool stuff instead. If you're open to it, give my dreamcoder.ai harness a whirl.
Been using superset for some time, but they dont have the cloud offering yet..
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.
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.
Not sure which one is worse: Meta or Theo
Theo's awesome!
He is just annoying, otherwise he is fine.
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.
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!
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
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.
What value could they possibly provide Anthropic? This is by far the best-case scenario for the team
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?
why sellout your company and your customers and community?
(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.
> The whole team is around to help answer any questions
Why did you sell out?
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'.
$
[flagged]
Heavy conductor user here. Does the hacker news community have any suggestions for replacements?
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)
I second this. T3 code especially for remote machine workflows is unmatched.
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.
https://herdr.dev/
Check Beolis (https://beolis.com).
Disclaimer: I'm developing it.
tern or orca or bb or vanilla claude code desktop / codex desktop
getbb.app
Claude or ChatGPT
Paseo is great
boxes.dev!
macro.land
Things will shut down over the next few months. https://www.conductor.build/announcement:
Flashback to Cloudflare acquiring Deno and hiding the shutdown at the bottom of their announcement -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019911.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?
I'd say tern or orca, some customization and a decent vps will get you 95%+ of the way there
superset.sh is quite a good option that will mostly get you there.
Glad for the team, sad for the product
I will miss it dearly.
I'm so glad I haven't even heard of them
Gah this sucks! Conductor is my main development tool. Now I'm forced to look for alternatives. Why can't they open source it?
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.
Over the years I've gotten extremely conservative with adopting any new tooling into my workflow, for exactly reasons like this.
With labs spending their fundings left and right and vibe-coding, it's absolutely irresponsible to adopt anything less than 18 months old.
Not tried it yet but DeltaDB from ZED (and ZED editor more generally) could cover it for you and they are open source.
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.
I switched to paseo.sh several months ago. It's just as good if not better.
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!
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?
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.
Everything you add to your tech stack is a liability. Period. I've always leaned minimalist.
Glad I started migrating all my projects to Paseo yesterday!
T3 code is much better than conductor.
I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.