Conductor

Google announced Conductor on 17 December 2025 as an extension for Gemini CLI, with Jay Kornder, Keith Ballinger and Sherzat Aitbayev credited as creators. Its premise is documentary: project specifications and plans live as Markdown files inside the codebase rather than in chat logs that disappear at the end of a session. `/conductor:setup` fixes the baseline, product definition, technology stack, team workflow preferences. `/conductor:newTrack` opens a feature and produces specifications and actionable task plans before any code is written. `/conductor:implement` executes that plan, and the developer can pause it, resume it later, or amend it as the implementation turns up new information.

Brownfield codebases are the stated target. Existing architecture and historical context get written down in structured form instead of being reconstructed for a model at each session, and the same files carry shared coding standards. Google situates the extension next to AGENTS.md files and skills systems.

Six months later, Conductor turns up in an unrelated story. Paul Sawers, writing for The New Stack on 16 June 2026, describes it as a multi-agent coding tool built on the Claude Agent SDK, and one of the companies forced to send customers a retraction after Anthropic suspended, on the very day it was due, the billing split that would have pulled Agent SDK usage out of Claude subscription limits. Anthropic told subscribers only that the change was paused and that for now nothing had changed.