Reed

The last reader the world needs.

This page is a markdown file, and you are reading it in Reed right now. Select a sentence and a reference chip appears, ready to hand to an AI. Drop one of your own .md files anywhere on this page: it renders instantly, and it never leaves your machine. Open the network tab first if you don’t believe it.

Markdown is eating documents

Agents write markdown. Plans, reviews, specs, and reports arrive as .md files, faster than anyone can comfortably read them in a terminal or an editor pane. Notes, docs, and READMEs converged on the format years ago.

Reed’s bet is simple: everything readable becomes markdown, and markdown deserves a beautiful place to be read. One calm surface, clean typography, your whole machine.

Reading is the feature

Everything below is rendered by the same engine showing you this page.

Code, with a copy button on hover:

reed notes.md          # open a file
reed plan.md:L40:60    # open at lines 40-60
reed --toggle          # summon the window from anywhere

And quiet things that matter: mermaid diagrams, syntax highlighting, themes that persist, and a serif designed for reading on screens. This page is set in Literata; the reader ships the same taste.

Built for the agentic era

AI agents produce more markdown than humans can comfortably read. Reed is built around that loop.

• Line references an AI understands: select text, copy plan.md:L101:110, feed it to your agent. Shipped.
• Reload awareness: an agent edits the file you are reading and the view updates in place. Shipped.
• Agent inbox: what your agents wrote while you were away. Next.
• Follow mode: watch a document while it is being written. Next.
• Live code references: file paths in a plan resolve to real code. Next.

Nothing leaves your machine

Reed is local software in the old sense.

• Files are read from disk and rendered on your screen. No upload, no account, no telemetry.
• Search rides Spotlight’s existing index: machine-wide results in under a second, no database of our own.
• The whole app is about 4 MB and one zero-dependency Node server. No Electron. It even exits when idle.

This website keeps the same promise. It is a static page; the network tab is silent.

Get Reed

The full app runs on your Mac and adds what a browser cannot do alone: machine-wide search, the reed command, and a summonable window.

reed                   # open the reader
reed --install-app     # put Reed in your Dock

Reed is being built in the open. The repository goes public soon, and reed.md is where it lives.

Paper, day, and night live in the toolbar above. This document is welcome.md; dropping your own file replaces it, and nothing you drop ever leaves this window.