Yet another Hacker News

43 points askedrelic 1 hour ago 55 comments

markerz 1 hour ago | parent

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.

BowBun 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

paaloeye 1 hour ago | parent

With labs spending their fundings left and right and vibe-coding, it's absolutely irresponsible to adopt anything less than 18 months old.

trcf23 1 hour ago | parent

Not tried it yet but DeltaDB from ZED (and ZED editor more generally) could cover it for you and they are open source.

mfe7 1 hour ago | parent

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

Philip-J-Fry 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

paaloeye 1 hour ago | parent

I'm so glad I haven't even heard of them

forthwall 1 hour ago | parent

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!

iamunr 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

Not sure which one is worse: Meta or Theo

sgallant 1 hour ago | parent

Theo's awesome!

Handy-Man 1 hour ago | parent

He is just annoying, otherwise he is fine.

gdulli 1 hour ago | parent

Everything you add to your tech stack is a liability. Period. I've always leaned minimalist.

gosen 1 hour ago | parent

Glad for the team, sad for the product

jahala 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

fabianlindfors 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

robertn702 1 hour ago | parent

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

mickeyp 55 minutes ago | parent

Save tokens and spend them on building cool stuff instead. If you're open to it, give my dreamcoder.ai harness a whirl.

feverishaaron 2 minutes ago | parent

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

Charlieholtz 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

jahala 42 minutes ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

> The whole team is around to help answer any questions

Why did you sell out?

2001zhaozhao 1 hour ago | parent

adam-eclse 45 minutes ago | parent

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'.

dayone1 1 hour ago | parent

why sellout your company and your customers and community?

williamdclt 56 minutes ago | parent

(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.

logotype 1 hour ago | parent

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

adam-eclse 56 minutes ago | parent

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!

paultannenbaum 1 hour ago | parent

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

priyadarshy 1 hour ago | parent

macro.land

harryck9 1 hour ago | parent

Paseo is great

2001zhaozhao 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

0xb0565e486 1 hour ago | parent

Claude or ChatGPT

217 1 hour ago | parent

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

fabioz 1 hour ago | parent

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

Disclaimer: I'm developing it.

hmokiguess 1 hour ago | parent

https://herdr.dev/

jl35db 1 hour ago | parent

boxes.dev!

mickeyp 56 minutes ago | parent

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 22 minutes ago | parent

getbb.app

cute_boi 1 hour ago | parent

T3 code is much better than conductor.

I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.

leofree 1 hour ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

gepeake 1 hour ago | parent

Glad I started migrating all my projects to Paseo yesterday!

stevenou 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

TheGamerUncle 1 hour ago | parent

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

217 18 minutes ago | parent

I will miss it dearly.

SethSchilbe 8 minutes ago | parent

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.