Conductor is joining Meta: what to do before November 13, and the best alternatives

Conductor announced the deal on November 4, and the Hacker News thread passed 200 points the same week. The reaction was mostly about the short Cloud deadline, plus requests to open-source the app and a long list of founders pitching replacements. Conductor's announcement does not mention open-sourcing. It does say active subscribers get a refund, Pro users keep Pro features for free, and that Conductor has “never sold or trained on Conductor user data.”

One naming note before you search: this is Conductor from conductor.build. It is not Netflix's Conductor workflow engine or Google's Conductor extension for Gemini CLI.

What are the dates?

If you only use the local app, nothing breaks this month. You have until early 2027. The rush is for Cloud workspaces.

How do I get my work out of Conductor?

1. Move Cloud workspaces to your Mac (before November 13). Right-click each Cloud workspace and choose Transfer to local. That moves the workspace and its chats.
2. Export your data (before November 20). Go to Settings → Account → Export data to download everything.
3. Commit and push every branch you care about. Conductor workspaces are git worktrees, each on its own branch. Uncommitted work lives only in that workspace's folder, so commit it and push the branch:

git worktree list

git -C "<workspace folder>" status

git -C "<workspace folder>" add -A && git -C "<workspace folder>" commit -m "WIP from Conductor"

git -C "<workspace folder>" push -u origin HEAD

git worktree list, run in the repository you added to Conductor, shows every worktree and its branch, so you can find each workspace's folder. Check the status output before you commit: add -A stages every file git is not ignoring, so leave out anything like a .env file. If there is nothing to commit, skip straight to the push. Once a branch is pushed, any tool can pick it up. Chat history is a different story: no other app imports Conductor chats today, so keep the export if you want to read old conversations later.

What did Conductor actually do?

It helps to know what you are replacing. Per its docs, Conductor runs Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode in parallel on your Mac. Each task gets its own workspace: a git worktree with its own branch, files, terminal and diff, plus workspace variables such as CONDUCTOR_PORT so dev servers do not collide. When the agent is done you review the diff, open a pull request, merge and archive.

Conductor's docs are also clear about one thing worth keeping in mind for every tool below: workspace isolation is development isolation, not a security boundary. The agents run on your Mac with your user permissions. A worktree keeps agents from editing each other's files; it does not stop an agent from reaching the rest of your machine. Paradev's README says the same about its own worktrees.

What are the alternatives?

Here are four of the tools people are switching to, three of them named in the Hacker News thread, checked against each project's own README or releases on November 10, 2026. They all do the core job: several coding agents at once, each in its own worktree or workspace, on your own subscriptions.

If you want the closest thing to Conductor, Orca and Paradev are the nearest in shape: a desktop app built around worktrees and CLI agents. If you were frustrated that Conductor was Mac-only, Orca, T3 Code and Bodega One Code all ship for Windows and Linux. If you would rather never depend on one company's app again, the open-source tools can be forked if their makers walk away, which is the lesson a lot of people took from this week.

Where does Bodega One Code fit?

Bodega One Code is a local-first desktop IDE, not only an agent manager, so it is a bigger switch than Orca or Paradev. If you want a Monaco editor, chat and an agent in one window and you were using Conductor next to an editor anyway, it covers both. Here is how Conductor's main pieces map:

What you get that Conductor did not have: it runs on Windows and Linux, Bodega's own agent works with any model, including fully local ones, with no extra CLI to install, and its Quality Enforcement Layer checks Bodega's own lanes before you review them. You can also run the same task through Claude Code in one lane and a local model in another, and compare.

What Bodega One Code does not do

• No cloud workspaces. Everything runs on your machine. If you relied on Conductor Cloud to keep agents working with your laptop closed, Bodega does not replace that; Orca's SSH and cloud VM option is closer.
• External agents are not sandboxed. When Claude Code or Codex asks Bodega to read or write a file or run a command, that request goes through Bodega's checks. Their own built-in tools run as you, under their own permission settings, the same as in Conductor. With air-gap mode on, Bodega refuses to start them at all.
• Parallel lanes cannot stop to ask you. Parallel runs use Act or Plan mode, and an external agent needs its ACP adapter installed to join one (for Claude Code that is claude-code-acp). If it still asks for an approval mid-run, the lane stops with an error; run that agent in a chat instead.
• External agents in parallel runs are desktop-app only. The Bodega CLI's fleet does not drive them yet.
• It is an open beta. It has bugs, and we fix them in the open on Discord and GitHub.
• No chat import. Your Conductor chats stay in your export.

How do I pick up a Conductor branch in Bodega One Code?

1. Download Bodega One Code and open your repository folder.
2. Install the agents you used in Conductor and sign in once in a terminal. Settings → Connections → External coding agents shows which ones Bodega found and the install command for any that are missing. To race them in parallel lanes, install each agent's ACP adapter too.
3. In a Code Mode session, open Send as… → Move this session to a worktree and, under Start from, choose An existing branch to keep working on a branch you pushed from Conductor. A branch that is still checked out in a Conductor workspace folder is listed but cannot be picked, so commit there and remove that worktree first (git worktree remove "<workspace folder>"), or pick An existing worktree, which starts a new branch from that worktree's last commit. Uncommitted changes are not carried over.
4. For a race, open Send as… → Start in parallel…, choose Compare models, and give each lane its model or agent.

Whatever you move to, the useful habit from this week is the same: push your branches often, and keep your work in git rather than inside an app that can be bought. If you are weighing Claude Code itself, see our Claude Code alternatives page, and the Fleet docs cover parallel runs in full.

Sources

• Conductor's announcement (dates, transfer, export, refunds): conductor.build/announcement
• Conductor docs (agents, workspaces, isolation): conductor.build/docs and Workspaces and branches
• TechCrunch on the acquisition: techcrunch.com
• Hacker News discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369503
• Orca: github.com/stablyai/orca
• T3 Code: github.com/pingdotgg/t3code
• Paradev: github.com/ParadevAI/Paradev
• Claude Squad: github.com/smtg-ai/claude-squad
• Bodega One Code docs: Fleet & background sessions and Integrations