June 11, 2026
Fast app, faster comment war
The Conductor Rewrite: What They Changed to Make It Fast
It got way faster, but the comments turned into a trust fight over hype, money, and whether it’s even the right app shell
TLDR: Conductor says a full rewrite made its coding app twice as fast, mostly by fixing the slow parts its own team hated using every day. Readers split instantly: some loved the speed race, while others questioned the hype, the funding, and the decision to keep the app framework.
Conductor says it rebuilt its app from scratch and came out twice as fast, after its own team got tired of living with slow chat, code browsing, and other daily annoyances. The company’s founders say the big theme was simple: they use the product themselves, so every frustrating lag became a personal problem to fix. On paper, it’s a classic startup glow-up story — small team, big rewrite, dramatic speed boost.
But the real fireworks broke out in the comments. One camp was genuinely excited, with people cheering that software makers are finally competing on who feels faster to use, not just who can cram in the most flashy artificial intelligence tricks. One commenter even asked for the ultimate showdown: Conductor vs. Zed on a real project, which is basically nerd-cage-match energy.
Then came the skeptical crowd, and they did not hold back. The sharpest jab? That this reads like an ad wearing a fake mustache and calling itself journalism. Another commenter went straight for the wallet, questioning how a free product can claim product-market fit — meaning proof that people truly want it — and why a company built partly on top of another company’s artificial intelligence deserves a $22 million funding round. Ouch.
And just when you thought it was over, a third debate popped off around the software wrapper they kept using. One developer was stunned they stuck with it at all, saying it caused so many problems for their own app that they ran back to Electron — yes, the thing developers usually complain about. That twist alone had strong “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” meme energy.
Key Points
- •The article was prompted by Charlie Holtz’s X post stating that Conductor had been rebuilt from scratch and made twice as fast.
- •Dennis Brotzky interviewed Conductor founder Jackson de Campos about the rewrite, technical decisions, and early product lessons.
- •The article says Conductor built the product for its own use, and that this dogfooding approach helped the team identify and fix issues quickly.
- •According to the article, performance problems in chat, worktrees, and code viewing led Conductor to undertake the rewrite.
- •Conductor’s core architecture remained a local-first React application wrapped in Tauri, while the article lists a detailed current frontend stack including React 19, TypeScript, Vite, TanStack Query, Zustand, and multiple UI and editor tools.