Hacker ApprovedDepartments

Conductor

Hacker Approved

Ranked 2 of 26 agent orchestrators by recommenders

Mac app for running many coding agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree, with easy setup. Critics say it is closed source and Mac-first.

Mac app for running many coding agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree, with easy setup. Critics say it is closed source and Mac-first.

83 people gave an opinion

recommend it
58
criticize it
25
approval share
70%
Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 11 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: recommended
  8. June 2026: recommended
  9. July 2026: recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: not recommended
  12. October 2026: recommended
  13. November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)

Why it carries the badge

  • 58 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
  • 2.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
  • Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

What people say about it

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Why people recommend it

Each mark is one comment

  • Easy git worktree setup and teardown

    “I started using it last week and it's been great. Uses git worktrees, experimental feature (spotlight) allows you to quickly check changes from different agents.”

    Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

    “Conductor has a feature that lets you define a script to copy .env and other things as needed from main repo into new worktrees on creation.”

    Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

    “Worktrees took way too much setup and hand-holding for me, but conductor.build made it easy!”

    Comment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Claude Code On-the-Go”
  • Runs many agent sessions in parallel

    “it was the key tool to 'get it' (coming from Cursor) when going from single threaded agentic dev to parallel agentic dev”

    Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

    “I use conductor with git worktrees and will literally have 10 or 20 running at a time”

    Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “Software Engineering Is Back”

    “I'm using conductor.build to manage multiple codex sessions at once.”

    Comment from 9 May 2026 in “Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc”
  • Visual UI for agent workspaces

    “The difference is removing friction, having a UI that shows me what's set up, that I don't need to hit the filesystem or git status to check in”

    Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

    “Conductor/Composer/Superset etc realized making the sidebar PRs/worktree focused rather than chat focused can feel great.”

    Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Cursor 3”

    “UI like Codex, Cursor, T3 Code, Conductor, Intent etc are necessary.”

    Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Printable Claude Code Cheat Sheet (auto-updated daily)”
  • Easy switching between models

    “makes it incredibly easy to try different models, even within the same workspace”

    Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “GPT-5.6”

    “lets me flip trivially between OpenAI/Anthropic models”

    Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Introducing GPT-5.5”

What people warn about

Each mark is one comment

  • Crashes, bugs and memory leaks

    “there was some bug where maybe it wouldn’t release file descriptors or something where my laptop needed to be rebooted twice a day”

    Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

    “Conductor's been crashing on startup all morning, and nothing I try fixes it.”

    Comment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: jmux – tmux-based development environment for humans and coding agents”

    “Memory leaks and random bugs seem to crop up in Conductor far too often.”

    Comment from 1 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents”
  • Closed source, login required

    “I like conductor.build, they are doing amazing job, but I don't want to give up my freedom and get heavily reliant on closed source”

    Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “AI fatigue Is real and nobody talks about it”

    “didn't love that they weren't open source or required a login to use”

    Comment from 5 May 2026 in “Claudette – An open-source desktop companion for Claude Code”
  • Tied to specific workflows

    “those have some improvements but are opinionated towards a specific set of workflows”

    Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “So where are all the AI apps?”

    “Existing tools like Conductor felt too tied to specific workflows (e.g. Git-based)”

    Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “I wrote a open source iMessage for your AI agents”
  • Runs agents on host with weak sandboxing

    “This occurred when using conductor.build with .claude/settings.json enabling sandboxing.”

    Comment from 4 Mar 2026 on Hacker News

    “not very jazzed about the fact that it was running the agents directly on the host”

    Comment from 29 Jun 2026 in “Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal”

    “Conductor relies mostly on the safety model of the underlying harnesses”

    Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: ctx – an Agentic Development Environment (ADE)”

Other agent orchestrators people recommend

The four most recommended other agent orchestrators, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.

Conductor compared with 4 alternatives
ProductRecommendCriticizeApprovalMonthsOwnedBadge
Gas Town9521231%101 mo3 owners—
ConductorThis page582570%11—Approved
Superset331667%82 mo4 ownersApproved
Scion by Google283247%8——
Agent Swarm16384%68 mo3 ownersApproved
See all 26 agent orchestrators, ranked

What people said

40 of the 90 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“The rest may come closer with linking PRs and issues, but they're desktop apps.”

MixedComment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Built Taskman, a Rust TUI for Parallel Claude/Codex Work on Issues+PRs”

“makes it incredibly easy to try different models, even within the same workspace”

RecommendsComment from 9 Jul 2026 in “GPT-5.6”

“not very jazzed about the fact that it was running the agents directly on the host”

CriticizesComment from 29 Jun 2026 in “Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal”

“I'll keep my Claude/Codex setup via Conductor for now”

MixedComment from 22 Jun 2026 in “GLM 5.2 vs. Opus”

“Use cmux or conductor to manage multiple instances of Claude Code”

RecommendsComment from 8 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is the AI setup for an experienced dev starting on a new project?”

“only recently swapped to using Orca for Remote SSH and perf improvements”

MixedComment from 5 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)”

“Then use Conductor for worktrees w/ Claude/Codex for mid-size tasks and code review.”

RecommendsComment from 5 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)”

“We don't build on top of the SDKs and don't plan to.”

MixedComment from 23 May 2026 in “Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era”

“I'm using conductor.build to manage multiple codex sessions at once.”

RecommendsComment from 9 May 2026 in “Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc”

“didn't love that they weren't open source or required a login to use”

MixedComment from 5 May 2026 in “Claudette – An open-source desktop companion for Claude Code”

“a tiny 7b model learning to boss around much bigger llms by figuring out who talks to whom and actually beating them”

RecommendsComment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Learning to Orchestrate Agents in Natural Language with the Conductor”

“The 7B Conductor was able to outperform every individual model in its pool”

RecommendsComment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Learning to Orchestrate Agents in Natural Language with the Conductor”

“lets me flip trivially between OpenAI/Anthropic models”

RecommendsComment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Introducing GPT-5.5”

“The difference is removing friction, having a UI that shows me what's set up, that I don't need to hit the filesystem or git status to check in”

RecommendsComment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

“Conductor has a feature that lets you define a script to copy .env and other things as needed from main repo into new worktrees on creation.”

MixedComment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

“it was the key tool to 'get it' (coming from Cursor) when going from single threaded agentic dev to parallel agentic dev”

RecommendsComment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

“there was some bug where maybe it wouldn’t release file descriptors or something where my laptop needed to be rebooted twice a day”

MixedComment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Parallel Agents in Zed”

“Konductor provides them with a persistent, self-updating memory of your project's rules, architecture, and state”

RecommendsComment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Konductor Workflow – The AI Orchestration Agent Framework for Every Dev”

“Existing tools like Conductor felt too tied to specific workflows (e.g. Git-based)”

CriticizesComment from 15 Apr 2026 in “I wrote a open source iMessage for your AI agents”

“Conductor's been crashing on startup all morning, and nothing I try fixes it.”

CriticizesComment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: jmux – tmux-based development environment for humans and coding agents”

“Conductor/Composer/Superset etc realized making the sidebar PRs/worktree focused rather than chat focused can feel great.”

RecommendsComment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Cursor 3”

“running X number of tasks in separate git workspaces concurrently”

RecommendsComment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Cursor 3”

“Conductor relies mostly on the safety model of the underlying harnesses”

CriticizesComment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: ctx – an Agentic Development Environment (ADE)”

“Memory leaks and random bugs seem to crop up in Conductor far too often.”

CriticizesComment from 1 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents”

“those have some improvements but are opinionated towards a specific set of workflows”

MixedComment from 24 Mar 2026 in “So where are all the AI apps?”

“UI like Codex, Cursor, T3 Code, Conductor, Intent etc are necessary.”

RecommendsComment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Printable Claude Code Cheat Sheet (auto-updated daily)”

“This occurred when using conductor.build with .claude/settings.json enabling sandboxing.”

CriticizesComment from 4 Mar 2026 on Hacker News

“gives you one place to manage all your MCP servers and syncs them to 9 clients automatically”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Configure MCP servers once. Sync them everywhere”

“give me a better UX for having a bunch of parallel workstreams”

RecommendsComment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity”

“It's really the shift to Conductor that convinced me that I crossed into a new reality of software work.”

RecommendsComment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity”

“I started using it last week and it's been great. Uses git worktrees, experimental feature (spotlight) allows you to quickly check changes from different agents.”

RecommendsComment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

“These are all proto orchestrators. No one has discovered/converged on what agent orchestration actually looks like.”

MixedComment from 10 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams”

“I like conductor.build, they are doing amazing job, but I don't want to give up my freedom and get heavily reliant on closed source”

MixedComment from 8 Feb 2026 in “AI fatigue Is real and nobody talks about it”

“I use conductor with git worktrees and will literally have 10 or 20 running at a time”

RecommendsComment from 7 Feb 2026 in “Software Engineering Is Back”

“It makes it easy to create worktrees (1 click) and manage them.”

RecommendsComment from 2 Feb 2026 in “The Codex App”

“if you leave a text input focused for too long the fans on your laptop will start”

MixedComment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Agent orchestration for the timid”

“They get the git worktree setup and teardown and managing dev servers part of it right IMO.”

RecommendsComment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Agent-of-empires: opencode and claudecode session manager”

“The combination of claude + codex + conductor + cc on the web and claude in github can be so insanely productive.”

RecommendsComment from 5 Jan 2026 in “Claude Code On-the-Go”

“Worktrees took way too much setup and hand-holding for me, but conductor.build made it easy!”

RecommendsComment from 4 Jan 2026 in “Claude Code On-the-Go”

“Conductor lets you run a team of coding agents on your Mac.”

RecommendsComment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.