Conductor: Elevating AI-Assisted Development with Context-Driven Planning

Measure Twice, Code Once

Benjamin Franklin famously stated, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Yet, in the era of AI, developers often rush into implementation without first establishing a clear understanding of what they are building.

Conductor, a new extension now available in preview for Gemini CLI, transforms this workflow by championing context-driven development. Instead of relying on fleeting chat logs, Conductor empowers you to create formal specifications and plans that reside alongside your code in persistent Markdown files. This approach ensures you plan thoroughly before building, review plans before code is written, and maintain the human developer firmly in control.

Control Your Code with Conductor

The core philosophy behind Conductor is straightforward: gain control over your code. Rather than immediately diving into coding, Conductor helps you formalize your intentions. It facilitates context-driven development by shifting your project's context from ephemeral chat windows directly into your codebase. By treating context as a managed artifact alongside your code, your repository becomes a single source of truth, guiding every agent interaction with deep, persistent project awareness.

Conductor enables you to:

• Plan Before You Build: Generate detailed specifications and plans that guide AI agents for both new and existing codebases.
• Maintain Context: Ensure AI adheres to your project's style guides, chosen tech stack, and product goals consistently.
• Iterate Safely: Review plans comprehensively before any code is written, keeping you actively involved in the development loop.
• Work as a Team: Provide all your AI agents with a unified project context and shared best practices.
• Build on Existing Projects: Leverage your current codebase to inform and drive design decisions.

Support for "Brownfield" Projects

As developers, a significant portion of our work often involves established codebases, commonly referred to as "brownfield" projects. These are precisely where many AI tools falter, lacking the nuanced understanding of a project's history, architecture, and implicit knowledge.

Conductor addresses this challenge with a pragmatic, context-driven approach. When introduced to an existing project, Conductor initiates an interactive session to help you establish a foundational set of documents detailing your project's architecture, guidelines, and goals. As you develop new features and undertake new tasks, Conductor continuously updates this shared context, ensuring its knowledge evolves synchronously with your project. This is just the beginning; expect substantial enhancements in this area in the coming months as we continue to invest in making Conductor an indispensable partner for your existing projects.

Conductor for Teams

Conductor allows you to define project-level context for your product, tech stack, and workflow preferences. Once set, these preferences become a shared foundation for every feature your team builds. For instance, teams can define an established testing strategy that Gemini would automatically adopt.

By centralizing your technical constraints and coding standards, you guarantee that every AI-generated contribution adheres to your specific guidelines, regardless of which developer executes the command. This shared configuration accelerates onboarding for new team members and ensures that features developed by different individuals feel as if they were written by a single, cohesive engineering team.

How Conductor Works: A Structured Workflow

Conductor provides a structured workflow for agentic development, ideal for tasks more complex than simple code edits. Unlike a standard chat session confined to a single interaction, Conductor leverages a set of Markdown files to plan and track progress over time. These Markdown files persist within your repository, allowing you to pause, resume work, and seamlessly transition between machines. Here’s a high-level overview of its operation:

1. Establish Context

   When you run /conductor:setup, Conductor assists you in defining the core components of your project. This established context can then be utilized for building new components or features by any member of your team.

   • Product: Define your users, product goals, and high-level features for the overall project.
   • Tech Stack: Configure your preferences for programming languages, databases, and frameworks.
   • Workflow: Set your team's operational preferences, such as adhering to test-driven development methodologies.

2. Specify and Plan

   When you are ready to tackle a new feature or bug fix, execute /conductor:newTrack. This command initializes a track – our term for a high-level unit of work. Instead of immediately generating code, Conductor helps you produce two critical artifacts for your track:

   • Specs: Detailed requirements for the specific job: what are we building, and why?
   • Plan: An actionable to-do list comprising Phases, Tasks, and Sub-tasks.

   Conductor will guide you through the creation of each artifact, suggesting answers based on its existing context to help you quickly build high-quality specifications and plans.

3. Implement

   Once you approve the plan, run /conductor:implement. Your coding agent then systematically works through the plan.md file, checking off tasks as they are completed. Because the state is saved persistently in a file, you can stop, take a break, and resume later without losing your progress. We’ve also incorporated checkpoints for reverting to previous versions, along with the ability to modify the plan mid-flight.

Get Started Today

We firmly believe that context-driven development leads to superior outcomes for complex projects. By treating your documentation as the definitive source of truth, you empower Gemini to function as a true extension of your engineering team.

Install the Conductor extension and begin enhancing your development workflow immediately by using the following command:

gemini extensions install https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/conductor