# Orchestras, not Factories — Charlie Holtz — session 2026-06-30T18:40:00.000Z → 2026-06-30T19:00:00.000Z _67 transcript lines · 19 slides · source: full recording_ ## Transcript Agentically is the key to increasing the throughput because then you can fit many more cycles into the same time window. And now how that loop works is, basically, we have a few stages. So this is when you are starting from scratch, like the current software development practices. You first create a spec for your agent or your Skill in this case. And here, you need to define all the responsibilities and the functions that agents needs to handle, the decisions that it has to make on certain conditions. And here, again, this is only the definition stage. Once you defined your agent's requirements Hello. I was at a wedding this weekend, and it was in New York and there were a bunch of trendy people there and, I I told I was talking to someone who I'd never met before and, I told him I was prepping for this presentation and he was like, oh, that's cool. Like, what's the conference about? And I said it was about AI engineering and I could just see his eyes glaze over and he started like looking behind me to find the next person to talk to and I'm it's like so cool to actually be in Full of people who actually wanna hear about this stuff. So, I I I'm very excited to be here. I am the cofounder of Conductor. Has anyone here used Conductor? Okay. Nice. Nice. Okay. Cool. So, for those who don't know, Conductor is a desktop app for managing a team of coding agents all at the same time. So instead of having a bunch of terminal windows for your cloud codes, your codexes, or your whatever, coding agent, you have one interface to manage them all. And one of the really cool things about building Conductor has been that I've seen a lot of the best Builders up close. I've, like, watched their workflow, I've seen how they work, I've seen the things they do do and the things that they avoid doing. And so, I thought I would compile a bunch of the principles, that I've seen the best engineers use, and give them to you all. So, here's what conductor looks like. Can you can you guys see this? Okay. Nice. Okay. So, here's what conductor looks like. And here Here are my principles for being the fastest builder in your organization. So let's start with number one, staying near the frontier. Staying near the frontier means you are always trying the latest things, basically the day they come out. It means that when, Ultracode comes out, you're trying it. It means that when, slash gold comes out, you're giving it a go. It's really important to stay near the frontier, for a few reasons. If you are doing your own startup, then staying near the frontier means that you will Come up with lots of new ideas for what you should actually be building. I mean, this literally happened to us. We were building a totally different app called Chorus. But we started using, we were such power users of cloud code back in February of last year that we started building our whole workflow around cloud code and we started cloning our repo five times and then we discovered work trees and then bit by bit we had built Conductor as an internal tool and we couldn't have figured Out if we, weren't staying near the frontier. And if you're not doing a startup, you should be the person at your company who always knows what the latest, the latest workflows are. It used to be that you could just kind of like use your social graph and the information that was important about the best workflows to use would trickle down to you. But things just like move way too fast now. You're always gonna be three to six months behind if you do that. So it's very important to stay near the frontier. And there's an important word here, near. There is a danger if you are at the frontier. You can you can do what, I call midwimp meming, where you're spending all of your time working on your workflow and not doing actual work. And so, internally we've come up with a heuristic for this. We call it don't beat the market. Don't try and beat the market. The concept here, like the heuristic you should use when you're trying to decide if you're near the frontier or at the frontier and, too deep in Into, the latest trends is you should ask yourself, why isn't this workflow the default? So, for example, when, Ralph loops were becoming a big thing, you should ask yourself like should I spend a ton of time optimizing my workflow to work with Ralph loops? Because if Ralph loops work for everyone, like if they are the default, then you probably should just wait for Anthropic or OpenAI or ever. To build the workflow into the into the default harness. You can think of this as sort of like an efficient market hypothesis where, unless you have like real alpha, you shouldn't be optimizing your workflow too much. And what I mean by real alpha is like some kind of information about either your users or your code base that the models might not know about. So an example for us is we it's we're a chat app. We have to render really long chats really quickly and performance is Is important to us. And so we need to spend a lot of time optimizing our React queries, to render the chats quickly. And we're willing to make sacrifices, in other parts of our code base to make that happen. So if you have some kind of alpha, some kind of information about the app you're building that the models might not know about, then you should put time into the workflow. Otherwise, don't don't midweb meme. Don't don't be the person who has an amazing emacs setup but like doesn't actually get stuff done. Okay, three. Create slot free zones. So, at Conductor we have this term we call a slot free zone. And a slot free zone is a part of the code base or a part of the app that requires really strict human review. And we're actually, I think, a little bit unusual in this way. I think a lot of people assume that we are pure token maxers and we are like ripping through like 30,000 line PRs but we're actually not. We're actually quite careful with certain parts of our code base and then very loose with other parts of our code base. The reason this is important is because if you are Not careful about your slot free zones, your your code your code base can get in a really tricky spot. And this actually happened to us. We've had to rewrite our whole app like a couple of times because we weren't careful about slot free zones. Specifically we have a, migrations file and, in our CI, any change to the migrations file requires the a human And to review it. We also assume that anything written in Slack is slot free. It's not written by the AI, it's written by a human. All of our docs, our cloud MDs, like all our skills, we put a ton of time into making them good. And this is also something I've seen with all the the best builders up close. Like they put an unusual amount of time into the Cloud MD or their skill files. And I think like another way that I've thought about this is like if you had a, new intern that was joining your company and you had the opportunity to, like, whisper something In their ear every time they started working. Like every day, anytime they sat down you could like whisper something in their ear. You would probably put a lot of thought into like what it is that you're whispering in their ear and this is what the Cloud MD or agents MD is. It's like information that gets loaded into the agent's context every time they start working. And so you probably want to put a lot of thought into, into those. Okay. Four. He the beast. At Conductor, we have a, internal tool we call the Conductor internal agent. And it is, we also also known as the CIA. And the CIA is basically like the the centralized database of everything that's happening in the organization. So anytime a new Slack message gets sent, the CIA picks it up, the CIA agent will see that a new message sent to Slack, it will pick it up and it will save it to a postgres, table. Anytime we have a meeting, we are recording it, and it goes into the CIA. We call this feed the beast because you you want to for your agents to be effective, in your company or you want them to have as much information and as much context as they can have about the way you guys specifically work. And the best way to do that is by having a centralized place for all of the information to go. Anytime a user has a bug request in Discord, the same thing happens. I think this this tweet sums it up pretty well. It's really effective to just put everything in a database and then give your agent a sequel tool and let it handle, handle the rest. Okay. Next is free range agents. Give your agents a lot of space to play. Give them give them a sandbox where they that won't get killed, where they can explore your code base, where they can work on really hard tasks, where they can they know that they're not gonna get shut down. When you close your laptop lid, give them give them opportunities to create more of themselves. Give them ways, to collaborate with other agents and other humans. I think what's really interesting about free range agents and like this concept and why this is important is the models are getting better and they are able to run for much longer and there are going to be many more of them. And so, if they are confined to your laptop, then they're not gonna be nearly as effective as, as if they are free roaming. The other thing that's important here is that once you give them a sandbox to play in that isn't confined to your laptop, there's a bunch of really cool stuff that you can build on top. And we have built some of those things into Conductor and I, I'll give you a quick glimpse into some of those cool things. So This is Conductor. I'm gonna make it a bit bigger. And this is actually a new version of Conductor that is, coming out this week, and it is centered around collaboration in the cloud. And so the the thing I said was you need a sandbox for agents to play. You need a free range agent. And so you'll notice that each workspace has a little cloud icon at the top, and I can click it and get information about the sandbox that the agent is running in. And what's what's awesome about this is I can close my laptop and agents are gonna keep running. Up up until basically this week, every, every task in Conductor was built on a git work tree, but now they're in a cloud sandbox. They are free range agents. But what's also really cool, that you can that we can build on top of, cloud is collaboration. So you'll see here, I'll make this even bigger. That's me and here are lists of the things that I am working on. And you can see that I am in the Doctororg. But if I scroll down, I can see what Caden's working on. I can see what Lewis is working on. I can see what Tywin is working on. And I can I can I can see that I can see Jackson's face pop up there? I can click in and see what he's working on in real time. And I think collaboration is the the one one of the most important new concepts in these tools that no one is really talking about right now. Collaboration is important because, not only as not only is it true that all great things are built with teams of people. They're not built by individuals. They're built by teams. But also as the models get better, as we've seen this with the two days of Fable, you can get a lot more ambitious with the kinds of things you're building. And if you're getting more ambitious, you're gonna need more people and more agents to work on those things. So I'm gonna go into a workspace that Caden is working on. This one. And I'm gonna say, I can review Do the changes that he's made. I'll make this a little smaller. And this looks fine, but I'm just gonna say, can we actually use tabs not spaces? And Caden should be able to see that message happening in real time. And he can actually chat in the workspace as well. So we can see here that he's typing. So I see Kin is typing. Let's see what he says. Seems like he's typing a lot. Okay. Maybe he stopped typing. I'll give him a second to take a look at it. But the point is we can now have collaborative workspaces that are shared in real time with people on our team. Okay. He's typing again. Okay. Come back. The agents have escaped. Alright. So, I'm really excited about this and we're rolling this out to, all Conductor users this week. I think I think collaboration is going to be one of the most important, one of the most important new interface changes, this year. The other really cool thing about cloud is that, and giving the agents the free range sandbox is that we can give the agents APIs to spawn themselves. So I have here a I'll bring up my open claw. This is my open claw called Lord Crandon. And you can see that it has, I don't know how well you can see this text, but it has access to a Conductor API. And so from my phone or from my Telegram or from Slack or wherever I am, I can say, hi, can you create a new workspace for me that makes Yeah. Makes all the buttons blue. And so I'll I'll text that to Lord Crandon, and Lord Crandon has access to the conductor API and so can kick off work itself. So let's see what it does here. Okay. So just created the workspace. The agent is on it, and then I can go into my Conductor. But I'm out and about, but it's still setting up the workspace. This and, it will do work for me while I am gone. So I'm pretty excited about all the, all the cool things we can build on top of of, free range agents. Okay. The final principle that I want to talk about today, and the title of this talk is orchestras, not factories. The whole, like, talk track today is about software factories, and I honestly kind of hate the term. I think it's the wrong way of thinking about these new tools that are emerging. I think, like, when I think of a factory, I think of automation and I think of, like there's a lot of amazing things about automation and like it makes our lives more efficient and we can like create more of everything. But I don't want the future to be built around factories. I want the future to I wanna feel like a human. I wanna like be in the flow. I wanna be like in front of an orchestra like way My baton and we're and like I wave it this way and this this team of agents starts working and then this intermingling of humans and agents starts working as I go here and I when I want to I can zoom in on the details but most of the time I can zoom out. And I don't think the future should be we are like managing swarms of agents and we are like factory line managers like pushing buttons, getting the agents to like pump out the next feature. Like we tried this like ten years ago with the term feature feature factories and it just doesn't work. Like I want my software to feel human and crafted. Want to feel like a human at the center of it all. And I think because we're all building these tools we actually have a responsibility to make the tools, great for humans. I think it's really important to like use the words that make us feel excited and like feel, feel capable and feel, like we're in the flow and having fun. And so, I don't think the future is, is is something like this. I don't want to be Don't want to be in in my dark factory. I don't want to be a line manager. I want to feel like this. I want to be in the flow. I want to be having fun. I want to be crafting things. I want to feel like I'm Steve Jobs designing the Mac with a team of amazing humans and AI agents all in the same place. Like, I want to feel like I'm in an orchestra. So here are my principles for, for being the best builder in your organization. Stay near the frontier. Don't try and beat the market. Create slot free zones. Feed the beast. Free range agents. Think about orchestras, not factories. Came up with this handy acronym for for remembering it, STCCFO. Alright. So thanks thanks a ton for, for having me. I'll be around. Feel free to ask questions and, I'll see you on the Internet. Okay. I wanna tell you a story about a factory that taught itself how to remember. Hi. I'm Rushab. I run MachineCraft, a 100 people factory in India. No data science team, no ML budget, none of that. And somehow we ended up building a 36 AI agent that runs our entire go to market. I think that's still a little ridiculous. Let me show you how it happened and why you can do the same thing. So here's the thing about our company. From the outside, it looks like machines and metal. Part that matters isn't the machines. It's the knowledge. Who the customer is? What we quoted them in 2019? Why that one machine needed that beard custom tweak? But the actual company, And for three generations, all of that lived in exactly three brains. Initially, my grandfather's, then my father's, and now mine, which is a genuinely terrifying way to run a company when you sit with it. A lot of people have joined us. People have left us. The revolving door never stopped. And every single time someone walked out, a chunk of our brain walked out with them. We weren't scared of the competitors, we were scared of forgetting, or waking up one day and realizing the whole company only existed inside two increasingly tired heads. So, I had an idea. I'll be honest, it sounded insane first. But what if instead of writing the knowledge down in some document nobody ever What if we grew a brain that just held it? Not a chatbot you poke at, a twin of the company. I didn't hire a sales team. I tried to build one. One. A quick detour because you need to know how messy this is. We make thermoforming machines. They heat up a plastic sheet and shape it. Same ## Slides ### 00:07:50 ### 3. Create slop-free zones Engineering the future of AI ### 00:08:48 ## 4. Feed the beast ### Engineering the future of AI ### 00:09:12 # 4. Feed the beast ### 00:09:43 # 5. Free-range agents ## Engineering the future of AI ### 00:10:13 ## 5. Free-range agents ### Engineering the future of AI ### 00:11:18 # AI Engineer World's Fair ## Engineering the future of AI ### Conductor Alpha - Hi Charlie! 👋 What can I help you with today? - I see you're ### 00:11:46 # AI Engineer World's Fair ## Engineering the future of AI ### Conductor Alpha application screenshot [Microsoft logo] [Screenshot of the Conductor Alpha application interface, showing a chat ### 00:12:18 # AI Engineer World's Fair ## Presented by Microsoft ### Screenshot of Conductor Alpha application - The application shows a task list and a code review interface. - A task ### 00:12:43 # AI Engineer World's Fair ## Presented by Microsoft ### Screenshot of Conductor Alpha application - The application displays a multi-pane interface for code review or project management. ### 00:13:21 # AI Engineer World's Fair ## Presented by Microsoft ### Screenshot of Conductor Alpha application #### Validation Engineering the future of AI [Screenshot of a macOS application named "Conductor Alpha ### 00:13:42 # Engineering the future of AI ## AI Engineer World's Fair Presented by Microsoft [Screenshot of the Conductor Alpha application running on a macOS desktop, showing a code collaboration interface with file changes ### 00:14:17 # Engineering the future of AI ## AI Engineer World's Fair ### Presented by Microsoft ### Conductor Alpha: Create PR - Org switching in `Cmd+K` is implemented and validated ### 00:14:42 # Engineering the future of AI ## AI Engineer World's Fair PRESENTED BY Microsoft ### Telegram Chat with Conductor AI Bot **Here's the full menu:** ### 00:15:16 # Engineering the future of AI ### Conductor API Capabilities (via Telegram Bot) - **Workspaces** - List all workspaces across a project - Create a ### 00:15:43 ## 6. Orchestras, not factories ### Engineering the future of AI ### 00:16:16 ## 6. Orchestras, not factories ## Engineering the future of AI ### 00:17:13 # 6. Orchestras, not factories ### Engineering the future of AI ### 00:17:46 # Engineering the future of AI [Black and white photo of a conductor with arms raised on stage, facing an orchestra and a large audience] ### 00:18:13 # Engineering the future of AI 1. Stay near the frontier 2. Don't try to beat the market 3. Create stop-free zones 4.