Multiplayer Coding Agents in the Cloud - Charlie Holtz, Conductor

Charlie Holtz (0:00)

Building anything great takes a bunch of people. And so I think in the future, it's going to take a bunch of humans and a bunch of agents to build great things.

Shane Thomas (0:09)

Let's go ahead and bring on our first guest, or only guest today. No Stranger to the Show has been on before, and I'm sure a lot of you watching have probably used Conductor. So why don't we bring on Charlie from Conductor. Charlie, how's it going?

Charlie Holtz (0:21)

Good, good. Thanks for having me again. It's good to see you guys.

Abhi Aiyer (0:24)

Good to see you too.

Shane Thomas (0:25)

Honestly, I don't remember how long it's been, but it's been at least three or four months, I think, since you've been on. And so I know you've been cooking a lot of things up over there.

Charlie Holtz (0:34)

Definitely been a lifetime in AI time.

It's funny, I was thinking about, last time we talked, it was also definitely pre-Fable. And one of the main things that has changed for us is that we don't use our local computers anymore. We don't use local hosts, we don't use work trees. Everything just happens on a remote computer that sits in the cloud somewhere. And it's kind of crazy to think that I used to live in a world where work trees matter so much. And so yeah, it's partly because the models have gotten, it's actually almost entirely just because the models have gotten so much better that we've had to adjust to this new cloud world. So yeah, excited to talk about how we thought about cloud and how we got there. And also just yeah, good to see you guys as always.

Shane Thomas (1:17)

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that you were definitely one of the first proponents of was don't look at the code. You know, you were definitely early to that. And it was, you know, people were wondering, well, where's the IDE? Where's the editor?

And I don't know if you ever even added that. And I know you could like view the code in there, but there's probably a lot of pressure early to add that. But I know you were very resistant to it because you kind of saw in the future a little bit and you're like, there will be a time when looking at the code will become less relevant. Not saying, you know, folks listening, I still occasionally look at code, but it is much rarer than it used to be.

Charlie Holtz (1:53)

Yep, it's funny, anytime we're thinking about adding a feature that either internally we want or our user wants, we try and think of is it going to be ahead of the puck or where the puck is or a little behind it. And one thing that we really debated was adding the terminal in the bottom right. When we first released the app, which is now a year ago, I really didn't want to do a terminal because I just felt like that wasn't the future. But we still have the terminal. And so that's one thing that I actually think has remained useful for a while. In terms of viewing the code and editing the code, we did finally acquiesce to user demand. And we added a thing that we call caveman mode, where you can edit the code. We're using Pierre's diff library for that, which has been amazing.

Shout out to the Pierre team.

They're awesome to work with. But yeah, we also don't look at the code that much anymore. And it's steadily trended downwards as the models have gotten better. I think there are occasions where looking at the diffs, the diff viewer is important just to get a sanity check. Honestly, the main reason I use the diff viewer is to see which lines the AIs have commented on. But yeah, even doing that is trending downwards for us.

Abhi Aiyer (3:06)

I mean, the growth of how the product has changed so quickly has been so awesome to see. Also, congrats on your Series A, by the way.

Charlie Holtz (3:13)

Thank you.

Abhi Aiyer (3:13)

That's amazing. So when did this shift for you? It's almost like Conductor became Cloud Agent Native overnight. It just came out of nowhere. But it obviously was seeded for a while. So at what point did you know where you needed to shift? And how did you both retain your current user base on the way there?

Charlie Holtz (3:32)

So we've been talking about this since December.

That's what I remember when we had our first conversations about Cloud becoming the next important thing. I think the reason we hesitated and went back and forth for it so long was because we just weren't sure how long the models were going to run for. The thing that just kind of made it clear that we needed to do this was when Fable came out, it was like, oh crap, these are quickly going to be in a world where these can run for not just minutes, but hours, days, even weeks. And obviously, if something is running for weeks, you can't just let it run on your, you know, I have a MacBook Air sitting right here, I don't want to just leave it propped open for a while. But the other thing that's really important is, when we launched Conductor a year ago, it was crazy at the time to imagine running even three to five Claude Codes at the same time.