OM DENNE EPISODE
"Code is almost like the sawdust of the conversation."
Charlie Holtz, co-founder and CEO of Conductor (YC S24), returns to Agents Hour to show how far coding agents have come in just a few months. Conductor started as a Mac app for running a handful of Claude Code agents in parallel. Now it's fully cloud-native and multiplayer!
According to Charlie, once Fable-class models could run for hours or days, keeping agents chained to your laptop stopped making sense.
Charlie gives a live demo of what he thinks everyone in cloud is overlooking: multiplayer. See every teammate's agents running in real time, jump into a workspace and steer an agent together, hand off a whole session with one keystroke, and watch agents spin up their own workspaces through Conductor's API. Along the way, Shane and Abhi dig into the ideas underneath it: code as a disposable byproduct of the prompt, the Figma-style collaboration unlock, why today's models aren't trained for multi-person conversations, and why Conductor built a native iOS app instead of just living in Slack.
Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays at 12 PM Pacific.
📚 ABOUT CONDUCTOR
Conductor: https://conductor.build
Conductor on X: https://x.com/conductor_build
Charlie Holtz on X: https://x.com/charlieholtz
📚 MASTRA RESOURCES
Mastra: https://mastra.ai
Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai
Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord
Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai
Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn
Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents
Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents
WHAT IS MASTRA?
Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process.
⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 Building great things takes humans and agents
00:08 Welcome back, Charlie
00:34 Goodbye local, hello cloud
02:23 Caveman mode & looking at the code
03:51 Going cloud-native: the Fable moment
05:35 The end of the cracked-open laptop
06:22 Demo: multiplayer in the cloud
08:28 Agents that create their own workspaces
10:37 "Code is the sawdust of the conversation"
10:51 The Figma analogy & one-click handoff
12:56 The multiplayer training gap for models
14:39 Why a native iOS app (not just Slack)?
15:49 The bar test / beach test
17:07 They're hiring
17:19 Outro
