Charlie Holtz

CEO of Conductor, advocating for AI-driven software development with human oversight.

Claims

As speaker

Mentioned in

Key positions and views

Code is becoming a disposable byproduct ('sawdust') of the software development process, with primary value shifting to high-quality prompt engineering.

Humans must retain control over high-level architectural and user interface decisions to ensure software feels 'crafted' and maintains a high standard of quality.

The future of software development involves AI agents that are significantly more powerful and operate in persistent cloud environments, not on local machines.

AI models require careful management and human-curated codebases ('slot-free zones') to avoid negative feedback loops where they learn from and perpetuate bad code.

Software applications will become increasingly 'malleable,' allowing end-users to modify them in a manner similar to how video games are modded.

Podcast consensus on Holtz

Points of consensus

▶Charlie Holtz consistently advocates for a future where AI agents handle the bulk of coding, rendering the code itself a disposable byproduct or 'sawdust' of the development process.Jun 2026

▶He maintains a strong belief that despite AI's growing role, humans must remain in control of core architectural and UI decisions to ensure products feel 'crafted' and maintain high quality.Jun 2026

▶Holtz's vision for his product, Conductor, is centered on the user acting as a manager or 'CEO' of their AI agents, reviewing their work and guiding their direction.Jun 2026

▶He repeatedly emphasizes the imminent need for AI agents to transition from local machines to persistent cloud environments to accommodate their increasing intelligence and operational duration.Jun 2026

Points of debate

▶All provided claims originate from a single source featuring Charlie Holtz, so there are no contrasting perspectives or debates between different sources.Jun 2026

▶A potential internal tension exists between his vision of completely disposable, AI-generated codebases and his insistence on maintaining human-written 'slot-free zones' for quality control.Jun 2026

▶Holtz's product development philosophy relies on the team's 'gut feel' from using their own product, a point that could be debated against more data-driven approaches like A/B testing or analytics, though no source presents this counter-argument.Jun 2026

▶The practicality of his prediction that software will become as 'malleable' as moddable video games is a speculative point not challenged or corroborated by other sources in the provided data.Jun 2026

Key themes

▶The Obsolescence of CodeJun 2026

Holtz posits that the act of writing code is becoming a secondary artifact, or 'sawdust,' in the software development lifecycle. He believes the primary work is shifting to crafting effective prompts that guide AI agents, predicting that entire codebases will become disposable and easily regenerated by improved AI models.

This theme suggests a fundamental shift in the valuation of developer skills, prioritizing high-level prompting and architectural design over line-by-line coding proficiency, which could disrupt developer hiring and training paradigms.

▶Human-Centric AI OrchestrationJun 2026

Despite his bullish stance on AI capabilities, Holtz advocates for a development model where humans retain ultimate control. He argues for human oversight on architectural decisions and UI to ensure a 'crafted' feel, and implements 'slot-free zones' to prevent AI-induced quality degradation from negative feedback loops.

Investors should note that this philosophy positions Conductor not as a full automation tool, but as a human-AI collaboration platform, which may appeal to enterprises wary of ceding complete control to AI.

▶Pragmatic Tooling and Infrastructure Scaling

Holtz details his specific preferences for AI models, using Opus for creative tasks and Codex as a 'workhorse' for debugging. He acknowledges the limitations of local hardware, evidenced by his own 128GB RAM machine and Conductor's current desktop constraints, which drives his strategic investment in a more powerful and persistent cloud infrastructure.

Holtz's focus on moving from constrained local environments to the cloud indicates a significant upcoming capital expenditure and a strategic pivot necessary for his vision of more powerful, long-running AI agents to be realized.

▶Dogfooding as a Product StrategyJun 2026

The development of Conductor is deeply intertwined with its own use; the team builds the application using the application itself. This 'dogfooding' approach informs their product decisions, which are based on their own 'gut feel' and daily usage rather than external analytics, leading to user-inspired features like 'Gary Mode'.

This insular, intuition-driven product strategy can lead to a deeply refined tool for power users like themselves, but it risks creating a product with a steep learning curve or a feature set that doesn't align with the broader market's needs.

Source episodes

Sentiment over time

Not enough data for timeline

Changes over time

July 2025

During the initial development phase of Conductor, Holtz reports spending $22,000 on tokens in a single month, indicating a period of intense, high-cost experimentation.

Summer 2024

Conductor is accepted into and participates in the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch, marking a key milestone in its startup journey.

Present

Holtz describes Conductor as a Mac-native desktop application built with Tauri and Rust, which his team uses to build the product itself. He identifies the current limitation that agents stop when a user's laptop is shut down.

Near Future

Holtz is actively investing in and planning for a significant shift to cloud infrastructure. This is driven by his prediction that agents will soon become 10x smarter and require persistent, powerful environments beyond a local Mac's CPU.

Suggested prompts

How does Charlie Holtz's philosophy of 'human-crafted' software reconcile with his prediction of fully disposable, AI-generated codebases? &nearr;What are the primary business risks associated with Conductor's 'gut feel' product development strategy and its heavy reliance on its own tooling? &nearr;To what extent is the concept of 'code as sawdust' a viable long-term paradigm, and what are the potential second-order effects on software quality and developer skills? &nearr;How might Conductor's planned shift to a cloud-based environment alter its core value proposition from a desktop-based agent orchestrator to a SaaS platform? &nearr;

Key concepts

Conductor (Product) 1 ep AI Agents 1 ep Software Development Philosophy 1 ep Future of Software 1 ep AI Models (Opus/Codex) 1 ep Business Strategy 1 ep Technical Stack 1 ep Human-in-the-Loop 1 ep

Notable quotes

“Code is almost like sawdust now in that it used to be that code was the thing you were building... And now you're putting time into describing what you want and how you want it to be built. And the code is almost just like sawdust that comes out of that process.”

Charlie Holtz · How Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Sets Up His Team Of AI Agents

“the ideal is like you should feel like the CEO of a little company and you can see all your agents working for you and they'll bring you up like digestible reports and then you can point them in the right direction”

Charlie Holtz · How Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Sets Up His Team Of AI Agents

“feels like we're very quickly moving to a world where the agents are going to run for 10 times longer and they're going to be 10 times smarter and they're going to need to run in an environment that isn't constrained by your Mac's CPU.”

Charlie Holtz · How Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Sets Up His Team Of AI Agents

“when the next generation of models come out, you can just like rerun your prompts again and then you'll get new code and the old code didn't really matter.”

Charlie Holtz · How Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Sets Up His Team Of AI Agents

Report last updated: Jun 10, 2026

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