Blog
Judgment is the job.
The Conductor is the model that plans your goal, dispatches the fleet, and decides when work is real. Picking it is a different problem from picking a coding model.
What matters
Three things worth paying for.
Judgment over speed
The Conductor plans a mission a handful of times and steers between tasks. Tokens per second barely register here, but a wrong decomposition costs hours of fleet time. Buy the model that decides well, not the one that types fast.
Long context
It reads your goal, the mission DAG, and the output of six busy terminals. A model that loses the thread halfway through a long mission will steer the fleet confidently in the wrong direction.
Cost in proportion
The fleet runs on your existing Claude login with no API key, so the Conductor is the only metered model in the room. Its planning turns are short next to what six sessions type, which makes a strong model here cheaper than it looks.
The menu
Cloud, router, or local.
Loom is bring-your-own-key. Go direct to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek, or Mistral when you want a provider's own terms and billing. Use OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint when you want one key and easy switching across models. Point Loom at LM Studio, MLX, or Ollama when you want the planner on your own hardware: no key, no bill, nothing leaves the machine. The honest trade is that frontier cloud models still tend to plan better, while local models win on privacy and price. Loom does not care which side you pick.
# bring a key, or bring none at all
direct OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI,
Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek, Mistral
router OpenRouter, any OpenAI-compatible
endpoint
local LM Studio, MLX, OllamaQuestions
Common questions.
Can the Conductor be free?
Yes. Run it on LM Studio, MLX, or Ollama and the planner costs nothing and stays on your machine. You trade some judgment for that, and for many missions the trade is worth it.
Why use OpenRouter instead of going direct?
One key, many models, and switching is a settings change rather than a new account. Going direct keeps you on the provider's own billing and terms. Both work in Loom, and changing your mind later is cheap.
Does the fleet need any of this?
No. The six coding sessions are real Claude Code CLIs on your existing Claude login, with no API key involved. The Conductor is the only model you bring. The models page has the full picture.
Hand it the work.
Walk away.
macOS, Linux, and Windows. Around 13 MB. Free and open source.