Microsoft Open-Sources Conductor — Deterministic YAML Orchestration for Multi-Agent AI Workflows

Summary

Microsoft published Conductor on May 14, 2026, an open-source CLI tool (MIT license, github.com/microsoft/conductor) that takes a deliberately different posture from LLM-routed multi-agent frameworks. Instead of asking an LLM to dynamically decide routing between agents at runtime, Conductor uses declarative YAML workflows with Jinja2 templating for conditional logic — the orchestration layer consumes zero tokens, and routing is deterministic and inspectable. Principal Software Engineer Jason Ro