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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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

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

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.

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!

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.

Glad for the team, sad for the product

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

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

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.

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?

Gah this sucks! Conductor is my main development tool. Now I'm forced to look for alternatives. Why can't they open source it?

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

disclosure: I am one of the founders

I will miss it dearly.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Glad I started migrating all my projects to Paseo yesterday!

"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.

The end.

> 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!

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

T3 code is much better than conductor.

I will avoid Meta and Google as much as possible.

Condoleances

FUCK

"Our incredible journey"

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

[dead]

[dupe]

Why does their page sound like donald trump

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

why sellout your company and your customers and community?

> The whole team is around to help answer any questions

Why did you sell out?

[flagged]

[flagged]

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