Conductor

Conductor is the one to hand a Mac user who directs agents rather than typing next to one. Every task gets a workspace, a terminal, a diff and a review path in one window, and it drives Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode on the subscription you already pay for. The trait that decides it is review: you read agent output like a pull request, not like a chat.

You need four or five tasks in flight to feel it. Pick it if you have them and a Mac. Pick Superset if the team runs Linux, and Claude Squad if you want none of the windows.

The risk is the meter that does not exist yet. The pricing page says cloud workspaces are currently included at no additional cost and that usage-based pricing is planned, so the number you budget today is not the number you will pay. There is no repository, so the closed app that holds your worktrees cannot be audited or patched by you.

Treat cloud workspaces as a trial. What it does right: the free plan runs everything locally on your own keys with nothing metered, so the failure mode is an upgrade decision you can decline rather than a bill you cannot.

The documented design is a partition per task. 1. Each task owns a workspace with its own branch, terminal, diff and review path, so concurrent agents never share a working tree. 2. Cloud workspaces are Vercel sandboxes specified at 8 cores and 16 GB of memory in us-east-1. 3. Multiplayer lets more than one person attach to a workspace.

No benchmark is published, and the app claims none for itself; capability is the driven agent's. The observation: an orchestrator that rents its sandboxes from Vercel has outsourced the hardest engineering to a company that may decide to compete.

A Y Combinator company selling a supervisor for agents it does not make. Pro is $50 a month, which is bold for a wrapper with no model inside, and the price tells me they believe review UI is worth more than the inference. The mobile app is marked coming soon, which is the roadmap telling you where the next round goes.

Moat: workflow habit and whatever merge tooling they build; switching cost is a git branch. Likely acquirer: Vercel, whose sandboxes they already rent, or a lab that wants a Mac front end. Position: hold; use the free tier, watch the compute line.

The demo is a clean review window. Procurement: sixty Teams seats at the listed per-user rate is $3,600 a month before the underlying agent subscriptions, and Teams is currently invite-only, so we cannot buy it today. SAML SSO, SCIM, a DPA and purchase-order billing are all in Enterprise at custom pricing. There is a SOC 2 Type II attestation, which helps.

Mac-only leaves the Linux engineers out. The only unattended path is a beta REST API on the $50 tier, so CI gets a preview contract, not a product. Onboarding is a download. Not yet; revisit when Teams opens and Enterprise has a price.

Closed. There is no source, no plugin API I can find in the docs, no MCP hook and no way to point it at a local model, because it does not talk to models at all; it drives terminal agents and inherits their settings. Bring-your-own-key is real, but the key goes into an app I cannot read.

The grudging part: the workspaces are ordinary git branches on disk, so leaving costs nothing and my work is never trapped. The Conductor API on Pro is the only scripting surface, and it is behind the paywall. Not mine. Usable.