Conductor

Dennis Brotzky and Jackson de Campos built Conductor, and here's the thing: they barely knew React when they started. That's not a flex—that's just the reality. But they had a problem worth solving, so they solved it. They built Conductor using Conductor, which is the cheat code most founders never figure out. When you live in your own product, every laggy chat message, every sluggish worktree, every slow code view becomes personal. It stops being a backlog ticket and becomes something you fix this afternoon.

The initial version hit product-market fit fast, but performance was killing them. Chat, worktrees, code viewing—these core features were frustratingly slow. So they did what most founders won't do: they rewrote the whole thing from scratch. Local-first React wrapped in Tauri with SQLite as the source of truth, rebuilt using TanStack Router and other optimizations. The result? Two times faster. That's not a 10% improvement—that's a fundamental shift. They're shipping updates constantly, each one full of fixes and refinements that only come from actually using what you build.