Conductor’s artwork announcing that it is joining Meta, with its mascot in a Conductor cap. Image: Conductor
Meta has bought Conductor, the Mac app that lets developers run a whole team of AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex at the same time, Axios reported on Wednesday. Conductor confirmed it within the hour: “I have big news: Conductor is joining Meta,” chief executive Charlie Holtz wrote in a farewell note signed by ten of its staff, and the site’s footer now reads “Conductor from Meta”.
The deal lands on the same day OpenAI agreed to buy Pierre Computer, the code-storage start-up behind part of Codex. Financial terms of Meta’s purchase were not disclosed, and Meta has not announced it itself.
What Conductor does
Conductor launched in July 2025 and describes itself as a Y Combinator Summer 2024 company based in San Francisco, led by Holtz and chief technology officer Jackson de Campos. Its product description calls it “a Mac app for running coding agents in parallel”: each task gets its own isolated workspace, with its own branch and git worktree, so several agents can work on the same codebase without treading on each other. Developers then review and merge the results.
The app runs the first-party Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode agents, and users bring their own subscriptions and API keys. In September it added sign-in with ChatGPT so people could run Codex on their ChatGPT plan. A paid Conductor Cloud service ran agents in sandboxes on Firecracker microVMs, and the company had recently added a multiplayer mode for sharing workspaces with teammates.
Conductor raised a $22m Series A in March 2026 from Matrix (whose Ilya Sukhar joined its board) and Spark Capital, with Y Combinator and founders of Notion and Linear also investing. At the time it said users had grown tenfold since January and that dozens of engineers each at Google, Meta, Amazon, Spotify and others used it. Its homepage now claims more than 100,000 users. Those figures are the company’s own and have not been independently verified. In April it bought cmd, a tool that brought AI into Apple’s Xcode.
What happens to Conductor users
Conductor is winding down, according to its release notes and announcement:
- November 4: no new sign-ups or app downloads. Free users can no longer upgrade, but existing Pro users keep Pro features for free.
- November 13: Conductor Cloud goes read-only. Old chats can be read and exported, but agents can’t be given new messages. Active subscribers will be refunded.
- November 20: Conductor Cloud shuts down and the company begins deleting Cloud user data.
- Early 2027: the local Mac app, which keeps getting new models and critical bug fixes until then, starts to wind down.
To keep work from the cloud, users can right-click a cloud workspace and choose Transfer to local, or download everything from Settings, Account, Export data. On privacy, the company’s FAQ says: “We have never sold or trained on Conductor user data, and we still won’t. We’ll delete all Conductor user data when the app shuts down in early 2027.”
‘Big, crazy plans for the next interface’
Holtz gave few clues about what the team will build at Meta, but promised users something soon:
We have some big, crazy plans for the next interface. If you liked Conductor, you’re gonna love what’s coming. We’ll have something new for you to use early next year.
Charlie Holtz, Conductor co-founder and CEO
Sources told Axios that Conductor’s fast product development and focus on developer experience are expected to help Meta build its next generation of AI coding products. Meta has been spending heavily to catch up at the frontier: it launched its Muse Wonder model in October claiming parity with OpenAI and Anthropic, and told investors the same month it would create a new class of shares to help pay for its AI build-out.
A race for the developer’s desk
Coding has become the field where AI labs fight hardest for paying users, and the tools around the agents are now being bought up. OpenAI agreed in June to buy Ona, a start-up building cloud coding environments and agent orchestration, and on Wednesday added Pierre. Conductor was one of the most popular apps for “orchestrating” several agents at once, and its strength was that it was neutral: developers could mix Anthropic’s, OpenAI’s and Cursor’s agents in one window. Whether a Meta-made successor keeps rivals’ models in the picker is the question Holtz’s note leaves open.
Why it matters
Meta has no hit coding agent of its own, and buying the team behind a popular multi-agent app is a quick way into the fight for developers. For Conductor’s users, the clock is short: anything in Conductor Cloud needs moving or exporting before November 20.
Sources: Conductor: Conductor is joining Meta; Conductor release notes 0.93.0; Conductor: Series A; Axios.
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