Charlie Holtz

Charlie Holtz was identified in his 2026 AI Engineer World’s Fair biography as CEO and co-founder of Conductor, a desktop app for managing multiple coding agents through one interface. In his presentation, “Orchestras, Not Factories: How the Fastest Builders Work,” he described how his team’s experiments with coding agents and Git worktrees grew into Conductor as an internal tool while they were building another app, Chorus.

Holtz advocates trying new tools early while reserving custom workflow optimization for specific user and codebase needs. He described Conductor’s practices for maintaining software quality: requiring human review of migration changes and carefully maintaining documentation and agent instruction files. He also explained how the Conductor Internal Agent collects Slack messages, Discord bug reports, and meeting recordings into a centralized Postgres database, giving coding agents organizational context they can query.

His demonstration presented persistent cloud sandboxes that allow agents to continue running after a laptop closes, shared workspaces with real-time collaboration, and remotely initiated workspaces through an agent with Conductor API access. His approach places human judgment and craft at the center of software development, with people directing collaborating teams of humans and agents as an orchestra.