darien.family

This is the private correspondence domain of the Reed family of Darien, Connecticut. It is not a business, a store, or a mailing list. It is the address the household uses for the ordinary back-and-forth of family life — school, doctors, the town, coaches, contractors, and the handful of people we trade plans with week to week.

The assistant

Some of our correspondence is handled by a private assistant that works for this family and no one else. It helps with the parts of running a household that are mostly scheduling and follow-up — proposing times, filling in forms, keeping a thread moving — and it signs its messages as what it is. Nothing it writes goes out without a person in the family approving it, and the information it touches stays inside this household. It is never used for advertising, and it is never sold or shared. The full privacy policy spells this out.

The schoolroom

Another thing built in this house is a tutor. It teaches a child to spell — starting inside a spoken word, at the sounds it is actually made of, and working out to the Latin and Greek that English is assembled from. It keeps no score, awards no streaks, and has nobody to beat. The reward for learning to split a word into its sounds is that you can split a word into its sounds.

The lessons are named the way they are taught — one for one, boxed in, shut tight, let it ring, where to split, fossils, immigrants, ask a relative — and it is all here, in the open, if you would like a look.

five letters, five tiles — the easy case.

The family office

The household keeps its own books, and the research behind them is done by agents rather than by hand. They read the primary sources — filings, earnings calls, the market’s own record — and they are made to write down what they expect before it happens, so the score is kept honestly rather than remembered kindly. Two hundred and ten of those predictions have resolved so far. The platform is idio.sh.

The workshop

All three are Brian’s work. Twenty years of building distributed systems, lately the infrastructure that agents run on — the sandboxes they execute in, the orchestration that keeps a long job alive across a disconnection, and the scorekeeping that stops any of it from grading its own homework. Whatever is not private to this household is published at github.com/bxxd.

Reaching us

The best way to reach the family is simply to reply to whatever thread you are already on, or to write [email protected]. A real person reads it.

— the Reed family