Today Conductor announced it's joining Meta and winding down. On the same day, HumanLayer joined Factory and OpenAI agreed to buy Pierre. Congratulations to all three teams. Building a developer tool people love is hard, and they did it.
If you use Conductor, here are the dates. New sign-ups closed today. Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13, and its data starts being deleted on November 20. The local app gets fixes until early 2027 and then winds down.
I have a few opinions about what today means.
1. The labs want the cockpit
Models are getting close enough that the place you run them is now worth buying. Whoever owns the app where you start, watch and review your agents decides which model you reach for first. Expect Meta's next tool to put Meta's models first, and OpenAI's to put Codex first. That's their right, and it's why your agent manager shouldn't belong to a model company.
Pane is an agent client. It runs Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and anything else with a CLI, side by side, and it has no model of its own to sell you.
2. A closed tool is a lease
When a closed tool is acquired, you find out on the day it happens, and you get a deadline. Conductor's team handled theirs well: refunds, export tools and a clear timeline. It's still a deadline you never agreed to.
Pane is AGPL-3.0. A future owner could change the license for future versions. Every version already released stays AGPL-3.0, and anyone can fork it, build it and keep shipping it. Promises from a company last as long as the company does. A license outlasts it.
The code also belongs to more people than us. 23 people have contributed to Pane on GitHub, and it has 236 forks. Many of those contributors started as users who fixed something that bugged them, and their work ships to everyone. If Greenfield disappeared tomorrow, Pane would carry on with them. Thank you to everyone who has sent a PR, filed an issue, or argued with us in one.
3. Open source on the way out is good. From day one is better
HumanLayer is going open source as part of joining Factory, and that's the right call. It turns a shutdown into a handoff. Users can self-host it and keep going.
It also means the best outcome depended on a deal going a certain way. When the code is open from the first release, nothing about your tools depends on a deal.
4. If your work lives in their cloud, it has their deletion date
Pane has no cloud, and you don't need an account. Your worktrees and branches sit in your own repos. Your terminals and agents run on your laptop, or on a machine you set up as a Remote Pane host over your own Tailscale or SSH. Your agents use your own subscriptions and keys.
If runpane.com went away tomorrow, you'd lose the website and the phone web app at runpane.com/app. Updates come from GitHub Releases, and your repos, worktrees, terminals and agents keep working.
5. Free has to be boring to be believable
The desktop app is free, as the pricing page says, with no seat limit, no trial and no paywall. Everything in the desktop app today stays free. If Greenfield, the company behind Pane, ever charges for something, it will be a separate hosted service you can choose to use. We don't want to be clever about this.
6. Trust what you can check
Open source only protects you if you're running the code you think you are. Every Pane release is built by GitHub Actions from the public repo and published to GitHub Releases with a SHA256SUMS.txt file. To check that your download wasn't altered, run this with your file's name:
shasum -a 256 Pane-2.4.213-macOS-arm64.dmg
# compare with the matching line in SHA256SUMS.txt on the release pageOn a Mac, stable releases are signed and notarized by Apple. To see who signed your copy:
codesign -dv --verbose=2 /Applications/Pane.app 2>&1 | grep "Authority=Developer ID Application"
# Authority=Developer ID Application: Dcouple Inc (FBM5YSF467)The signing certificate still carries our former name, Dcouple Inc. If you see any other name or team ID, don't run it. Nightly builds aren't signed, so use a stable release for this check.
Do this with every tool that runs agents on your machine. Those tools can read your code, your keys and your terminal.
7. Say exactly what you collect
Pane sends usage analytics to PostHog, tied to your git or GitHub email. It's on by default. It records which screens you open and which buttons you click, with the text on screen masked. It never sends your code, prompts, terminal output or agent conversations, and it doesn't record your screen. We use it to see which features people use. We don't sell it, and we don't use it to train models.
One switch in Pane's privacy settings turns off analytics and error reports. Pane still sends a small ping with a random install ID, the app version and your OS when it starts and once a day, so we can count active installs.
Every agent tool should publish a section like this one. If yours can't tell you what it sends, ask why.
Coming from Conductor?
- → Cloud workspaces first. Before November 20, right-click each Conductor Cloud workspace and choose Transfer to local. Pane can only bring in what's on your Mac. To keep a full copy as well, use Settings → Account → Export data.
- → Your scripts. If your repo has a
conductor.json, Pane reads its setup, run and archive scripts. - → Your worktrees. Pane adopts your existing worktrees.
- → Your conversations. On a new install, Pane's first screen offers to bring in your recent sessions. Later, open Pane Chat, Pane's built-in orchestrator, and say "migrate to Pane." It finds your Conductor, Claude Code, Codex and Cursor sessions, opens each in a Pane tab, and checks that the agent picks up where it left off.
- → Nothing new to pay. Pane uses the same Claude and Codex subscriptions you already have.
Download Pane for Mac, Windows or Linux, then read Bring your work into Pane.
Companies get acquired. That's fine. Your tools shouldn't go with them.