Meta Acquires Conductor as Local App Winds Down in 2027

If your engineers run parallel coding agents in Conductor Cloud, finish moving them by November 12: workspaces go read-only on November 13, and Conductor starts deleting cloud data on November 20. Conductor announced on November 4 that it is joining Meta, and Meta confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch while declining to share details. Terms were not disclosed.

Teams on the local Mac app have until early 2027, with one problem starting today. New users can no longer sign up or download the app, so the engineer you hire next month cannot join a workflow your team standardized on. Choose the replacement this quarter, whichever version you run.

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What Meta Bought and What Conductor Promised

Meta bought a tool that sits on top of other companies' agents. Conductor runs parallel agents in isolated workspaces on a Mac, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and does not build the agents itself. TechCrunch reports that founder and CEO Charlie Holtz will work with Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman at Meta, and that he promised "big, crazy plans" and "something new" by early next year.

Conductor raised a $22 million Series A from Spark and Matrix on March 30, seven months ago. That post named Google, Meta, HubSpot, Ramp, Datadog, Block and Spotify among companies with dozens of engineers on the product, which is a vendor claim. Meta was a listed user before it became the owner.

The dates come from Conductor's announcement and its 0.93.0 changelog, checked November 4, 2026:

Date	What changes	What you can still do
November 4	Sign-ups and downloads stop. Free users cannot upgrade.	Pro users keep Pro features at no charge.
November 13	Cloud workspaces go read-only. Active subscribers get a refund.	Read old chats and export data. No new messages.
November 20	Cloud shuts down and deletion of cloud user data begins.	Nothing in Cloud. Export before this date.
Early 2027	Local app stops getting new models and critical fixes, then winds down. All Conductor user data is deleted at shutdown.	Use the local app until wind-down.

Conductor Cloud launched on July 30, 2026, so it will have lasted under four months. One Hacker News commenter wrote that they went "all in" on the cloud setup the day before the news and is now taking a refund and moving their org to T3 Code.

This notice is more specific than the one Sundial's customers got. When Meta bought Sundial in October, nobody published a closing date or a wind-down window. Conductor has given dates, a transfer tool, a refund and a written data commitment: "We have never sold or trained on Conductor user data, and we still won't."

What the Announcement Leaves Out

The announcement is written for individual users, and a company running Conductor has open questions. It does not mention teams, organizations, contracts or single sign-on, even though the product has a Team tier. It gives no processing date for refunds and does not list what the export archive contains.

The first gap is transfer timing. The announcement says export survives the read-only period. It does not say whether "Transfer to local" does, or which time zone the dates use, so treat November 12 as your last safe day.

Automation is the next one. The Conductor API manages cloud workspaces, including webhook-triggered routines, and the shutdown notice does not mention it. Assume any Slackbot or routine built on it stops sending prompts on November 13. Deletion also has no end date: November 20 is when it begins, so ask for a completion date in writing.

Cloud also holds credentials your security team will want back. Setup connects the Conductor GitHub App to your repositories and lets admins add shared agent API keys for the whole organization. Organization-wide secrets go in the Cloud Computer environment. The setup and environment pages do not describe the GitHub App's scopes or how to disconnect it, so check the install screen in your GitHub organization's settings.

Why You Should Not Plan Around Meta's Successor

No one has promised that the new product will run your current agents. Asked what the team will build, the announcement says "We can't share much yet," and it does not name Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. The strongest case for waiting is that this team built a tool engineers liked, the new product may support every agent, and Meta has not said otherwise. You can afford to hope for that while you run a pilot, but early 2027 is a bad time to learn the answer is no.

Two facts make a mixed-agent successor harder to count on. Meta now sells a competing agent, Muse Code, which launched in August. A tool that kept Claude Code and Codex would also depend on its rivals' subscription terms, and Conductor has already had a scare there: Anthropic announced billing changes for third-party Agent SDK tools on May 13 and delayed them indefinitely on June 15. Conductor added Sign in with ChatGPT for Codex in September. The dependency risk is this publication's inference, and we found no comment on the deal from either lab.

Data terms are another reason to wait for paper. Conductor's no-training line covers Conductor user data. It says nothing about a future product, and on Meta's own pricing page Muse Code "subscriptions default to Contributor mode," which uses your content to train future models. We flagged that default when Muse Wonder shipped. Any successor needs its own security review.

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What Moves With You and What Does Not

Your code moves easily because Conductor's isolation is ordinary Git. A git worktree is a separate working directory with its own files and branch, sharing the same repository history and remote as your main checkout. Conductor creates a worktree and branch for each workspace, so pushed branches do not depend on the app.

The workflow around the code takes more work to carry over. Setup, run and archive commands live in .conductor/settings.toml, which teams commit to the repo, and anything relying on CONDUCTOR_PORT needs a new port scheme. Files in a workspace's .context folder are not committed, so copy anything you want to keep.

Before you clean up a machine, find everything Conductor left on it. A Paradev migration fix reports three worktree paths: ~/conductor/workspaces/, <repo>/.conductor/<name> on older versions, and ~/conductor/cloud-workspaces/ for cloud clones. It also says Conductor's Claude sessions sit in ~/.claude/projects, where claude --resume can find them, with 30-day default retention. Paradev is a competitor, so verify both claims on one machine.

Which Replacement Fits Your Team

Use your agent vendor's own tooling if you run one agent, and pilot Orca if you run several. The native tools cover worktrees and parallel sessions without another vendor in the path. The third-party shells exist for the job Conductor did, which is mixing agents in one place. All details below were checked on November 4, 2026.

Option	Agents	Platforms	Licence or price	Watch for
Claude Code with agent view	Claude only	CLI; desktop app	Included in your Claude plan, per a third-party roundup	Agent view is a research preview. Desktop worktrees are off by default.
Codex app	Codex only	ChatGPT desktop app	Your ChatGPT plan	Keeps 15 managed worktrees by default, then deletes after a snapshot.
Cursor	Cursor only	Cursor	Your Cursor plan	Keeps 25 worktrees machine-wide and can remove ones made outside Cursor.
Orca	Any CLI agent, 34 named	Mac, Windows, Linux	MIT	Check who maintains it and how often it ships.
Emdash	Nine named, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor	Mac, Windows, Linux	Apache-2.0	Run your own security review.
Paradev, formerly Superset	Any CLI agent	Mac; Linux experimental; no Windows	Pro $20 per user; Team $60 and Ultra $200 add cloud workspaces	Its page and licence file say MIT; an October 29 roundup lists ELv2. Confirm before you fork.
T3 Code	Seven, including Codex, Claude Code and Cursor	Mac, Windows, Linux, web, mobile	MIT	Its README says "We are very very early in this project. Expect bugs."

T3 Code is the one to leave off your company standard for now, on its own maintainers' description. Paradev is the one to test first if hosted sandboxes are what you will miss, though Conductor's multiplayer workspaces need separate checking in any replacement.

Check the licence before you choose. An MIT or Apache-2.0 tool can be forked if its maintainers sell, and Conductor's users have no such option: Paradev's comparison lists it as proprietary, and one Hacker News commenter asked "Why can't they open source it?" Another commenter in that thread needs none of these products: "I just use the official cli + desktop apps now. tmux + a bit of custom scripting works wonders." That works for a small team of comfortable terminal users. It gives a manager of 200 engineers nothing to standardize on.

Do not stay on local because Pro is free. Pro was listed at $50 a month as of October 29, and that saving lasts only until the app winds down.

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What to Do Before Each Deadline

This Week:

1. Name one owner. Have each engineering manager report which repositories and GitHub organizations use Conductor, split between Cloud and local.
2. Run Settings → Account → Export data on one account, open the archive and write down what is in it. Conductor has not published the contents.
3. Email support@conductor.build with four questions: when refunds arrive, whether Transfer to local works after November 13, when deletion finishes, and what happens to any signed order form.
4. Stop creating new Cloud workspaces.

Before November 13:

1. Push every branch. Then right-click each cloud workspace you still need and choose Transfer to local.
2. Run the full export for every account, and store the archives where your retention policy says they belong.
3. Find every bot or routine that calls the Conductor API, and give it an owner and a replacement.

Before November 20:

1. Confirm that the transferred workspaces open and build on a Mac.
2. Rotate every secret and shared agent API key that was entered into Cloud, and revoke Conductor API keys.
3. Remove the Conductor GitHub App from each GitHub organization once nothing still needs it.

Before Your Next Engineering Hire:

1. Pilot one native tool and one third-party shell on the same repository for two weeks. Use the harness comparison method so you can tell the shell's effect from the model's.
2. Port .conductor/settings.toml into the winner's format, and add a .worktreeinclude for gitignored files if the tool supports it. Keep your setup scripts as plain shell in the repo, so the next switch needs only a thin config file.
3. Send the winner through the same data path review you would give a coding assistant.

The Bottom Line

The neutral tools around coding agents keep getting bought by companies that sell agents. SpaceX closed its Cursor deal on August 14, OpenAI announced Pierre on the same day as this deal, and Meta now owns the shell that ran its rivals' agents. Conductor's users got their exit terms as a few dated lines on a web page, and only the workflow files in your own repo stay under your control when the next one sells.

Export this week, then run the pilot before your next hire needs a seat.

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