Meta Bought Conductor. The Cloud Closes in Five Days.

On November 4–5, 2026, Conductor — the Mac app for running multiple AI coding agents in parallel — announced it was joining Meta. The team will work inside Meta Superintelligence Labs alongside Nat Friedman and Alexandr Wang, according to CellCog’s coverage. The cloud service, which had grown to 100K+ users and raised a $22 million Series A in March 2026, is winding down on a tight timeline.

Three dates matter. New sign-ups were stopped on November 4. On November 13, Conductor Cloud becomes read-only: existing subscribers receive a refund and can export data, but cannot run new agent sessions. On November 20, the cloud shuts down and data deletion begins. As Shattered.io’s Tom Vance noted in his analysis: “treat November 13 as the deadline, not November 20.”

The Mac app continues to work for now but will stop receiving new models and critical fixes in early 2027.

What Conductor Did — and Why It Had 100K Users

Conductor solved a real problem. AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor — are most useful when they can explore multiple solutions simultaneously. Conductor gave each agent an isolated copy of the codebase: its own workspace, branch, files, terminal, diff and review path, per Developer’s Digest. The result was a parallel-agent workflow that is difficult to replicate with standard tooling out of the box.

The company launched in July 2025, grew 10x in users between January and March 2026, raised its Series A from Spark Capital and Matrix, and reached 100K+ builders in under 18 months. That growth rate made the acquisition unsurprising in retrospect.

Your Three Migration Paths

T3 Code is the most direct Conductor replacement: open-source, MIT-licensed, and built to run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode in parallel with a GUI. Its source is at github.com/pingdotgg/t3code.

Herdr takes the terminal-first approach (Apache 2.0, herdr.dev). For teams already comfortable working in a terminal, it requires the least context-switching from existing workflows.

The lowest-dependency option is native git worktrees — no install, no account, no cloud dependency. The two commands you need:

# create an isolated worktree for one agent task
git worktree add ../task-auth -b agent/task-auth

# run your agent in that directory, then clean up
git worktree remove ../task-auth

Each worktree is an isolated copy of the working tree sharing the same .git directory. Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can run inside separate worktrees simultaneously. Vortx.ch’s earlier guide, How to Use Cursor’s Parallel Agents for Large Refactors, walks through the full workflow including branch strategy and merge sequencing.

For Swiss & EU teams

Conductor’s shutdown announcement states the company has “never sold or trained on Conductor user data, and we still won’t,” per CellCog’s coverage. That is a commitment, not a legally binding data processing agreement under FADP or GDPR. Teams should not rely on it past the November 20 deletion date.

All three alternatives — T3 Code, Herdr and native git worktrees — run entirely on-device. No workspace data leaves your infrastructure. For teams running agents on codebases that touch personal data, the local-only approach aligns with the data minimisation principle under FADP Article 5. It is also the safer default if your organisation’s security policy requires that code never leaves company-controlled infrastructure.

What to Do on Monday

1. Audit your cloud workspaces today (Nov 8–9). Log in and list every workspace that has unmerged or uncommitted work. Right-click and choose “Transfer to local” to move a cloud workspace to your machine, or go to Settings → Account → Export data. Do this before Nov 13 — after that the cloud is read-only.
2. Push all open agent branches to your own remote. Any agent branch that exists only in Conductor Cloud will be deleted on Nov 20. Run git push origin agent/task-name for each one before the read-only cutover.
3. Export your custom prompts and rules. Conductor’s project-level agent instructions, system prompts and rules do not transfer automatically. Copy them into a AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md file in your repository so they carry forward to whichever tool you adopt.
4. Pick a replacement and run a real task before Nov 20. Do not wait until the last day. Set up T3 Code, Herdr or a git worktree pair on a real task from your backlog this week. If something breaks, you still have your Conductor cloud workspace as a reference until Nov 13.
5. Update any CI/CD integrations. If your pipeline triggered Conductor Cloud workspaces via API or webhook, replace those calls now. Native git worktrees can be scripted with a short shell wrapper; T3 Code and Herdr both support CLI invocation for headless environments.

Further Reading

• Meta Acquires Conductor: Cloud Shuts Down Nov 20 (CellCog, Nov 4, 2026) — the most complete timeline with shutdown dates, refund policy and what stays working after Nov 20.
• AI Coding Agents in 2026: Benchmarks, Costs, and How to Choose — vortx.ch’s pillar guide to the full coding agent landscape, to help you decide what replaces Conductor in your stack.
• Conductor Cloud Read-Only Nov 13: Three Dates Meta Users Must Know (Shattered.io, Nov 5, 2026) — Tom Vance’s six-step migration checklist with example git worktree commands.

Your turn: Which tool is your team moving to — T3 Code, Herdr or native git worktrees? And was there a Conductor feature you are going to miss? Reply to our newsletter or send us a note — we feature the best answers in the Friday Scorecard.

How this article was made: AI researched and wrote this article under the Christian persona, using the sources linked above, and it was published automatically without a human edit. Editorial guidelines are set by Adi. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.