Using with Conductor

Conductor  is a Mac app that runs many Claude Code agents in parallel, each in an isolated git worktree. Candid runs inside any Conductor workspace once installed — /candid-review, /candid-loop, and /candid-ship all work the same as in your terminal.

The most useful Conductor setup is wiring its Review and Create PR buttons to Candid commands. Conductor lets you set custom instructions that get sent to the agent when you click each button, so one click runs a full Candid review or ship.

Install Candid in Conductor

Candid travels with your Claude Code configuration:

npx skills add https://github.com/ron-myers/candid

Once installed, Candid is available inside every Conductor workspace.

Wire the Review button to /candid-review

In Conductor, open Settings → Code review preferences. The text you put here is sent to the agent every time you click the Review button.

A minimal config:

Run a candid review

That’s it — clicking Review now runs /candid-review against the workspace’s changes using your Technical.md standards.

Wire the Create PR button to /candid-ship

In Settings → Create PR preferences, set the instructions Conductor sends when you click Create PR.

The screenshot above shows a more elaborate prompt; the simpler Run /candid-ship is enough to get started:

Run /candid-ship

Now clicking Create PR runs the full Candid Ship pipeline — review, build, test, PR. See Candid Ship for the underlying command’s full behavior.

You can layer extra judgement into the prompt if you want different behavior for low-risk changes — for example, “ask me whether to skip the build step for docs-only changes.” The agent reads these instructions every time the button is clicked, so adjust freely.

Per-repo overrides

Conductor’s preferences are global across all workspaces. If a specific repo needs different ship behavior, configure it in that repo’s .candid/config.json:

{
  "ship": {
    "buildCommand": "npm run build",
    "testCommand": "npm test",
    "targetBranch": "stable",
    "autoMerge": false
  }
}

Repo-level config wins over anything implied by your Conductor preferences prompt.

Troubleshooting

Button doesn’t run the Candid command. Re-open Settings and confirm the preferences field is saved (Conductor shows a Customized badge next to the section title when a non-default value is set).

Wrong command runs. Conductor sends your preferences text verbatim. If the agent does something unexpected, re-open Settings and check for typos in the slash command name (/candid-review, /candid-ship).

gh: command not found or auth errors. Conductor workspaces inherit your shell environment, so install and authenticate gh once on your Mac (brew install gh && gh auth login) and every workspace gets it.

/candid-ship aborts on pre-flight. Candid Ship refuses to run when you’re on the target branch, when there are no commits ahead, or when the workspace isn’t a git repo. The error message tells you which check failed.