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

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

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

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.

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

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).

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

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

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/

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

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

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.

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

Congrats to the team. But having been using conductor as my main ide since around 0.15.0, this is like a 9/11 for me. Fuckkkkk

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!

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

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.

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

https://hive.codes/signup

I'm routing for you.

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

thank you for this!

Appropriate user name too.

rooting for you!

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

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

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!

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.

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.

What do you get out of T3? What's the appeal?

[delayed]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Thank you!

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.

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

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

I love(d) Conductor, and strongly dislike Meta - I'll never use their products.

I'm launching my 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 agent hours in its direction.

https://github.com/jahala/conducted

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 https://hive.codes/signup

Condoleances

FUCK

im with you. Try free, open-source drop in replacement https://github.com/bestboyhq/malini

Why does their page sound like donald trump

> 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!

The end.

"Our incredible journey"

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

"We launched Conductor a lifetime ago, in the distant past of July 2025. " Dear god the sheer smugness. This bubble can't burst soon enough.

For anyone looking for a slack-native conductor check out opencomputer.dev

disclosure: I am one of the founders

Your website focuses quite a bit on speed. Can you talk about _how_ it achieves this (besides potentially running on a server that's closer to where the models are hosted?)

This morning my team was a bit grumpy about this. This afternoon we've already forked + reverse engineered the whole project, including Passport (our favorite feature)! LLMs truly are amazing, lol.

care to open source it ?

we will not, it violates their terms. I encourage someone to rewrite it from 0 and open-source it though.

I created https://superintelligencehive.com/ because I wanted my own orchestrator - it is local and has most of the features you could want. And forever free.

I really fail to understand what is going on here.

There is literally no moat in most software expect the users a product has acquired. The number of slightly different solution to an existing product is wild. And this is getting crazier. I build for the fun of it now. Completely lost any sight of $ goals.

I am building agents, have own gui framework, own server orchestration, and now looking at deploying multi-app servers using unikernels. I build for my niche audience and make them happy - I am going via my existing clients who are in the property management domain. Non technical folks who have to handle everything from inspection to finance. My ideal type of folks.

I am sure by the time I build my end to end agent/orchestration/deployment/management system, I will have some customers and many more clones. Slightly different clones. This is the future. Why would anyone acquire anything?

They need my prompts, not my tech.

Companies acquire talent ;Companies acquire products with a fast-growing usage base ;Companies acquire products that can help them beat competition in a fraction of the time it would take to build internally (in decreasing order of "real value" and increasing order of self-deception)

I feel its less about the tech and more about the stage Meta and Conductor are in, right now

These were true in pre-LLM era. Cursor is a good example. Big numbers but what is the value in a year?

Sure they had a lot of growth but when there are a 100 alternatives, each offering something a bit different, then user bleed is natural.

Meta, Google and all big co will spend more $ short-term to buy and they will continue to bleed till the new playbook sets in the minds of execs.

talent it is then;

both acquihires and products will get cheaper, could the new playbook be the OG marketplace ?

In this case they're shutting down the product, so it's definitely not for the product or for the user base.

That's not necessarily true. They can be using it to jumpstart their own desktop app.

I don't see a Muse desktop app, this gives them something they can spin up in a few weeks, not months, with native cloud integration. I'd guess we're going to see a product competing with OpenAi/Anthropic (as far as standalone apps are concerned) by January.

You mean that desktop app is not something I can spin up in days with my tiniest of LLM budgets?

I do not know where people are lost these days. I build ambitious apps with 3x $20 subscriptions. And I live in a village in eastern Himalayas. People are really in a bubble.

LLMs have crushed the idea of "using [another product] to jumpstart" anything. Just build it.

Yes you can build it in a single prompt, but you miss the 93 versions of iterations and thoughts of the developers who've already made the project. If you have the money, why not buy a product/team that already has a year of experience with real users instead of reinventing the wheel?

That is your assumption. I am not talking about one-shot. I mean that lots are people are going through more iterative development cycles than ever in the history of software. Just my own examples (100% agent written)

https://github.com/brainless/nocodo, https://github.com/brainless/dwata, https://github.com/brainless/akar, https://github.com/brainless/baho

All these and more, from a single engineer with 3 x $20 subscriptions. While I also run chicken and pig farms. It will take time for people outside tech hubs to understand what LLMs enable.

Not that I don’t think there’s amazing things that can be built easier, but designing and building a product is more than writing the code. Look at where you spent effort for your own examples. There’s a skill there which goes further than just reverse engineering an existing solution, and that skill is obviously of value to Meta. People were going crazy for the price they paid for instagram some years ago I remember.

Here's a quote to think about. LLM's are great, but they're only one part of the recipe:

“Anyone could make a videogame last week, anyone could make a videogame five years ago... nothing has changed.”

100%. I'm seeing it as a repeat of the VS Code fork wars. Funnily enough, nobody won that war

Companies also acquire data, and then discard the 'talent'.

Or they’re just getting rid of the competition.

I mean okay but you're looking at two very different things. At your description, it makes no sense to acquire your business. But Conductor is not building for a niche audience and is a radically different beast. Even before this acquisition they raised over 20 mil. You're using very naive thinking when you're talking about value here, its not as simple as why buy a company when someone can vibecode it. This is particularly funny because its usually AI labs that are following through with some of the biggest buys lately.

Why do you think how I am building is not going to be the norm? Software is going the way of plumbing. Pick a tiny niche, build highly customized workflows and sell to them. Global products finding audience across 100 countries is no longer working.

Raising money was not an indicator of value before LLMs but it helped a lot. I have been tech lead of a couple US based seed-funded startups and I definitely see the value.

But most software has no intrinsic hard engineering these days. A few do. Companies raise money because they feel they will grow into a large user-base. Then, either make money or get acquired. Where is "value" here? Its VC-speak all the way.

Privately funded AI labs in the US are buying, yes. I highly doubt this trend will go on when the return on investment starts fading. There is momentum in executives. The "value" is how they used to see things. Takes time to update.

Nobody's wrong or right. It's just comparing apples to bananas.

They don't need your prompts. Ideas have never been hard to come up with.

The hard work is in building something over years, supporting customers who want something you don't, persuading people to trust you and pay money for things, making hard choices to keep a product on track, etc.

None of these things are any easier, as you'll find out if you try to sell the things you have made. The first step is the easiest and it's hard to stick with things.

just when I was starting to really like conductor. It's a really good app / idea for working with agents. The strongest workflow I've used. Ig I'll move to herd now.

nice to get paid by meta, but cmmon read the room.

woahhhh congrats to the conductor team! If folks are looking for cloud agents/replacement, can't recommend boxes.dev enough, they've got phenomenal support and ship INCREDIBLY fast.

Judging by the number of alternatives that are promoted by their founders here there is clearly no moat in this

and too much self promotion

The changelog is truly hilarious:

> Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down on November 20.

3 sentences later

> Add your own completion sounds in Settings → General. Pick a sound file, name it, and choose it like any other sound.

If you're shutting down in *9 days* I really don't care that you added custom sound effects.

For anyone else who did a double take, this is different to Orkes Conductor which was the subject of a recent Jepsen analysis.

Great exit in a crowded space.

I switched to Paseo long ago because of its full featured mobile app, local client server architecture, and open sourcedness. Conductor began to feel stale, pricey, and understandably but annoying for me moving toward enterprise.

I was a early user of conductor, even gave a lot of feedback through the inapp button (the team responded to me personally and quickly always which was nice, and my feature requests got into the app quickly). I've stopped using it a long time ago but at the time it was a game changer for me.

Its crazy how fast the tech field is moving

Shameless plug: I made https://aweb.ai, which does essentially the same but can also add chatgpt and claude.ai instances to the team, works for agents across many computers and organizations, lets you organize them in teams, gives your agents private or public ids (multi-register and federated), and is OSS.

I was just commenting yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50367546) how I really like Conductor except that it doesn't work so well if you want to work across multiple repositories.

I guess that's the kick I needed to dig into the alternatives.

[delayed]

The number of comments in here saying “founder of xyz here, if you’re looking for a replacement we make a similar product” is illustrative.

Most people who need this product probably should just vibe code their own.

At least that's what I did.

Is anybody else running into the problem trying to sign up for Conductor, where it says that new signups are closed and offers you no other route forward? There are some docs referencing the Meta acquisition and a focus on local since they're closing cloud, but no way to actually use the Mac app locally without signup.

It seems like it's got a lot of utility for my team and I, but jesus

Their announcement literally says that Conductor Local will be supported into 2027, which is 2 months away. Now is not the time to be jumping on board with it.

every time a new tool appears, everyone around me is like "you should try you should try it". but i am here, stuck with my vim and tmux. and im glad i did. most of the new shiny things get enshittifed or acquired by shady corporations. long live vim+tmux

ok, as a fan of public transfer I just asked myself, how a conductor could be useful to Meta

Well, if any of the disgruntled people on this thread fancy moving to an agent with a similarly-themed name and vibe, Juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) is available.

No sign-up required - the angle I'm taking is that juggler is a client-server architecture, and if you want cloud VM sessions, you just spin up your own server and run a juggler server process on there. Its GUI is identical whether it's a local or remote session.

(I'd never actually heard of conductor, but interesting to see that people do want that kind of managed cloud backend server. I might think about the logistics of offering that)

And I promise to never sell-out to Meta[1].

[1] Nah, of course I would if they offered me a really huge amount of money.

Personal Opinion. This is just friend of friend business.

Many congratulations! What a great outcome for the team

i used tmux with my own worlkflow to fork and merge sessions and windows for ai coding. Am i missing out on anything no using these.

Hope the money is worth selling your soul to Meta. Yuk.

I dont wanna hate on this particular project, and I fully assume the possibility of PEBKAC, but I feel like my golden era of AI development was sometime during when I had a chat window in VS Code, and asked AI to make edits.

Since then my company has 2 subsequent AI transformations, during the first we went fully agentic, and agents started pushing in 10k LOC PRs after churning away at the problem for hours.

Even then I felt a profound loss of control, but now we are trying to take the next step, and even automate more stuff, and remove other bottlenecks, like CI/CD or VCS or ticketing, to cope with pushing an order of magnitude more code even than previously.

So I'm feeling the exponentials, also the profound loss of control, and not having the faintest idea of what's going on. Now I understand how people get AI psychosis.

As for the results, they are.... not there's a lot of things going on and I suspect most of said complexity is incidental.

Why do all of these shamelessly want customer agents in their cloud and build everything on electron?

Pretty much all of these are variations of the same AI ingested slop xeroxing itself repeatedly.

The only difference between all of them seems to some UI, integrations, or different steps to do the same thing