On the best parallel AI coding tool
I've been rotating between "parallel AI coding tools" every few weeks for most of 2026 - apps like Conductor, Superset, Emdash, Paseo, and VibeKanban. Some, like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Desktop have converged on offering similar functionality.
It's an overwhelming category, with at least 100+ options available today, ranging from free up to $100+/mo. I haven't tried anywhere near the entire universe of them myself, but definitely more than the average person. Here's the journey I went through, and why I eventually landed on the tool I use now (spoiler alert, it's Paseo).
My usage profile
Models: I have the $200/mo plan for both Claude and for ChatGPT, and mix usage between them. Occasionally, I'll play with other models via OpenRouter. I also have a desktop PC which runs some small models locally, and I access that capacity on any of my devices via Tailscale.
Workload: I use them for a mix of personal and work-related coding (from simple web apps to complex Rust codebases), data analytics (DBT model for Goldsky's internal analytics), documentation updates, and more generic chat where I just prefer the coding agent interface for it's rich skill and plugin base vs. Claude / ChatGPT web UIs. I don't use these for LLM development or any "frontier" research, nor for non-engineering work like chemistry or philosophy.
Skill: I am not an engineer - I don't know how to code, and am not qualified to read something an AI model generated and judge if it's well written. I used to build HTML and Wordpress websites in high school, but lost the plot some time between 2012 and 2015 when when CSS became an abstract nightmare.
My journey to Paseo
I started, I think like most people, with AI as a sidecar to my IDE with Cursor. This was a natural evolution from the IDE-first world we used to live in. But right before Cursor itself evolved into parallel agentic coding (with it's 2.0 release), a few things happened:
Models got way smarter
They got better at longer-running, repo-wide changes
They got fast enough to generate good code faster than I could read it
This meant that working on a single file and workspace started to feel... slow? And with my brain already fried by TikTok to crave fast feedback loops and dopamine hits, I pretty quickly asked myself "what if I got 20 Cursors going at the same time", opening the door to a new archetype of coding tools: worktree orchestrators.
My first worktree orchestrator
Worktree orchestrators didn't exist before ~2023, and were built precisely to solve this new need: doing more AI things, quicker. Many tools now have some version of this built in, but the high-level idea is to make a local copy of a safe starting point, iterate on it with an AI agent, and then merge back up to that starting point when the new feature/fix is tested and approved by the user. By doing this, you can work on X features at a time, each in it's own isolated workspace. The worktree orchestrators do exactly what they sound like - they orchestrate these on your behalf, managing the process of creating isolated workspaces, merging back up to the main, managing conflicts, and tearing down the workspace once it's job is done.
The first one I became aware of, and used myself, in this category is called Conductor. And it's a great place to start, especially for my type of usage profile, because they take care of everything. I think of them in the same bucket as Linear - polished, opinionated, with all of the details thought through. This immediately unlocked the exact workflow I wanted, and is likely a reasonable place to stop for many folks. But I then purchased a beefy non-Mac desktop machine for local AI development, and Conductor is Mac-only.
Going multi-device, multi-platform
A Google search for "Conductor.build alternative for Windows" found a few options including Pane, Emdash, and VibeKanban; Emdash seemed the most polished and mature of the three so I tried it first. And it was a step forward in that it worked on Windows, but a step backward in that the main window is effectively a raw terminal, not a clean wrapper like Conductor's chat-style view.
I actually prefer the terminal view, but this was around the time when Claude Code specifically was a glitchy, laggy mess, and scrolling up in the terminal was an unreliable way to actually see history. The work done by Conductor to re-render this as a clean UI with file edits in-line, tool calls, and chat responses spoiled me, and because of this Emdash never quite "clicked" for me. Pane looked effectively the same so I didn't even give it a full shot, and tried VibeKanban instead, which was actually pretty magical for two reasons:
It's web-based, which means I can run it on my desktop machine
It reframes worktrees around tasks, and puts those tasks in a Kanban board.
Both of these are simple but incredibly powerful. #1 meant that I could use VKB on my phone, unlocking the ability to vibe code on the go, with the full context and codebase of my desktop machine, for the first time. For #2, every other coding tool has some task/issue integration which I used, whether Linear or Github, or in the case of Emdash, Plane as well. But VKB actually integrates more tightly where the task and the worktree are the same thing, and my planning, prioritization, AND vibe coding all happened in one interface. This was a really powerful mental framework for me and I was quickly hooked, convinced my search for another tool was over.
And then on April 10, 2026, disaster struck.
In a category this frothy, shutdowns are inevitable, and a product being open-source is a major advantage in helping me feel comfortable with that risk. Luckily, VKB is indeed open source, but unfortunately hasn't successfully transitioned to a community of maintainers: the last PR merged is from April, and none of the forks seem to have active development either. This on it's own isn't a huge issue given the core functionality still works, but the "age" starts to show pretty quickly given how quickly the upstreams are developing. VKB doesn't handle Claude Code workflows for example.
My current tooling
In the hunt for a more actively maintained, cross-platform, and cross-device tool, I briefly took a second look at the first-party tools (Codex and Claude Desktop) but neither stuck despite their seamless, Conductor-tier UX because they only allowed me to use their own models. I took a quick look at Cursor but had to quickly rule it out because of the lack of mobile support at the time. And then I finally found Paseo, which has been awesome for one simple reason: it is incredibly multi-platform.
It works on Mac, Windows, and also in a headless mode which I have running on my server. The clients can be Mac and Windows too, as well as my phone and a web app for occasionally using a friend's device.
Like with VKB's "tasks are worktrees" mental model, this sounds simple on paper but in use has driven a much deeper change in how I work. What Paseo really says is "work on anything, anywhere". Anything, ie. code you have on any device, including production servers. Anywhere, ie. literally anywhere. Every other AI coding tool gets about 95% of the way on either or both dimensions, but that last 5% is critical.
Pre-empting how this might come across - the point isn't "work more, vibe code all the time, never disconnect from your devices", though that's definitely a risk. The point is instead to actually let me get AWAY from my computer more often. My total screen time between desktop, laptop, and phone has actually gone down since switching to Paseo not up, which is a bit counterintuitive. Looking at that stat is actually what prompted me to start writing this piece to begin with. On reflection, I think I know why.
Being able to work on anything, anywhere, means that on average I am working more creatively and more efficiently. When I'm deep in a hairy analytics problem and have been going back and forth with Claude for an hour, I can still walk away from my computer in the middle of the day and go touch some grass without having to lose my flow. And that fresh air and change of scene usually kickstarts me to the shift in perspective I need to get unblocked.
What I'm still looking for
However, no tool is perfect just yet. I'd love to have the task-based flow of VibeKanban, the multi-device, multi-platform, multi-model capabilities of Paseo, and the polish + thoughtfulness + usability of Conductor in one app.
But beyond these, there's an expansion of the "tasks as worktrees" idea that I haven't found natively implemented yet. Every tool treats "worktrees" as the core primitive around which everything else is orchestrated. Whether they run locally or on a cloud, whether they are laid out in a list or a Kanban board, the underlying primitive is a worktree session. Open one, work in it, close it. The next agent has no clean memory of what happened, outside of the git commit messages that it needs to read fresh every time, or a context file that is updated on each teardown.
But the actual work isn't session-based; it has history, decisions, approaches tried and abandoned, and context that isn't captured in the code that's left. I'd estimate ~20% of my token usage is going to rebuilding some mix of this from scratch. I built a modified version of Napkin to help manage this, but it's pretty rudimentary.
With the way this category is developing now, I'm sure I'll have a dozen tools to test that have a handful of approaches to managing this problem, and I'm looking forward to testing them out. If you've got any tips to share for how you're managing this yourself, or have another tool you use that I didn't cover above, would love to hear them.