We really need the best of both worlds: IDE (powerful like Intellij) + ADE (multitasking code)
And how does it compare to other tools like Conductor?
The ADE is best for steering multiple agents and reviewing their changes, especially once you care about isolated worktrees, diffs, artifacts, and landing changes cleanly.
When you need deep code navigation, the best answer is usually to open the worktree in your IDE. IDEs are already world-class at navigation and refactoring, so there’s no reason to rebuild that badly inside an agent UI.
Compared with Conductor, a few differences:
- Conductor relies mostly on the safety model of the underlying harnesses; ctx can run work in VM/container-isolated environments with explicit network policy.
- ctx has a local merge queue for landing changes from multiple agent worktrees onto each other.
- Conductor is a local Mac app; ctx also works with Linux and is designed for the “local app + remote Linux runtime” model for devapp/VPS.
- Conductor is focused mainly on Claude Code and Codex; ctx is meant to be a broader environment around multiple harnesses.
There are also substantial UX differences, but those are easier to judge by trying them.