Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once
29 comments
·July 17, 2025itsalotoffun
Full read-write access required to all your Github account's repos. Not just code. Settings, deploy keys. The works. Full access to your organisation settings. Not a privacy policy in sight. Zero disclosure of data practices.
You are INSANE to authorize this app on anything other than throwaway code.
@charlieholtz care to comment?
atlgator
Is it Claude Codes or Claudes Code?
myflash13
I was really excited to try this but this does NOT work the way I expected. I wanted a simple git worktree manager for my existing, already-checked-out repository. Instead, it requests Github permissions and clones the repo from Github. This is bad, because you need to run all the dependency installs, etc. for every workspace before being able to test anything. In other words it's like Codex or Cursor Background Agents, except worse, because it's on your machine. The reason I don't use Codex or Background Agents is because my project has way too many dependencies and would take way too long (and too complicated) to install everything required to have an isolated running instance, plus there would be DNS conflicts, external API conflicts, among other issues.
What I do want is simple git worktree management for an already-checked-out repo on my machine, no Github permissions or dependency re-installation (copying node_modules, etc.).
zachrip
I tried out git worktrees recently and while they do what's on the tin, I really didn't like them as much as I thought I would. I actually like the way cursor does it despite the fact that it is a VM - I wish I could have their same UI/UX but with local worktrees.
pjm331
Yes I had a similar experience. the thing that tripped me up with git worktrees, which is maybe obvious in retrospect, is that they don’t include things that are not tracked by git - e.g. .env.development.local
So starting a new worktree requires additional setup and isn’t as simple as just checking out a new branch
lachances
Any way to have it not require full write access to your entire GitHub account?
freedomben
Cool idea, and I'm definitely not in the target market (I'm a Linux user and also very hesitant to adopt proprietary tools to my important workflows), but something like this could be useful. Right now though it's pretty easy to run each in a different tmux window and check on it, but once I have about 3 or more running at a time it's very easy to forget about one and have it paused waiting for confirmation. A tool like this to add a dashboard of sorts would be nice. Definitely interesting to think about!
simonbw
I have been imagining something like this would be perfect for working with Claude Code. I tried a couple other apps but they seemed to change too much without providing enough value for that change. This feels like just a nice clean simple extension of how Claude code already works that solves my most common pain points in the workflow.
Anyways, excellent work!
lordnacho
Looks cool, but I don't quite get it? What happens if I just open a new terminal window and start Claude in that?
simonbw
That works when you just do it once. Where you can run into problems is when you do that twice. One instance might change a file one way, and the other might change it in a conflicting way, then you have two Claudes getting confused about the state of that file and it gets messy. You can solve this by checking out multiple copies of your repo and having only one instance of Claude working per copy. This app seems like it just provides you with a nice UI for doing that.
lmeyerov
Yes that's how I do Claude code manually, git branch per terminal window, and very rarely multiple agents on the same branch
It mostly works, except we don't have a clean flow for docker: shared system daemon & repository means need to manually tag & run by branch/project (docker compose -p ...), which is friction for the LLM and even more setup than we want
As a heavy multi session Claude Code user, this may be what finally converts me to cloud IDEs...
null
rapatel0
Can you intelligently bake in Claude code router? That would help both with token budget but more importantly multiplexing between different models.
davidbalbert
We do our dev on Linux desktops using VS Code ssh remotes from our Macs. Is this possible with Conductor?
abdullin
Is it similar to what OpenAI Codex does with isolated environments per agent run?
janpieterz
Love it! Even just simply freeing my main branch would be a big win so I can keep working as well.
But no way to find out if there’s any data sent to your servers etc, unless I’m missing some links?
dgritsko
This is awesome. A couple of suggestions:
- It'd be great to change the default branch used for creating new workspaces.
- I'd like the ability to add custom tools to the "Open in..." menu.
Charlieholtz
Ah yeah! Which IDE do you use?
> It'd be great to change the default branch used for creating new workspaces. Yeah you can actually change this now! If you click the repo name you can make changes to the "setup script". If you added `git checkout -b "branch name"` it would run that on every new workspace instance.
dgritsko
At the moment it's mostly Cursor or VS Code, but I was actually thinking of SourceTree. I'd like to look at the pending changes and manage the commits myself, and I could do that if I could add "open -a SourceTree ." as a custom command. I didn't see a place to edit a setup script, is that just on the filesystem?
Charlieholtz
Got it! If you click the repository name in the left sidebar, you should see a field for setup script.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945870105109246401.html
https://x.com/charliebholtz/status/1945870105109246401