Tom Redman

Tom Redman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Better Email, a company developing AI-powered marketing tools for real estate professionals. Previously a product leader at Buffer and head of developer experience at Convex, he has built software for contractors, developers, and businesses seeking practical applications for AI.

While working at Buffer, Redman founded Site Command, a construction-management platform for small residential builders. Drawing on earlier experience in drywall and residential and light-commercial construction, he interviewed contractors and developed the product outside his regular job. Site Command handled work orders, project updates, customer approvals, and contractor communications; during the COVID-19 pandemic, Redman made the platform temporarily free and absorbed its operating costs. The company was acquired in November 2021.

Redman subsequently worked in real-estate technology at Curaytor before joining Convex, where he led developer experience and explored reactive application architecture, type-safe development, and real-time synchronization. His experimental assistant Floyd, demonstrated at AI Engineer World’s Fair 2024, connected Convex, Twilio, Google Cloud speech recognition, OpenAI models, and an Express server to place telephone calls on a user’s behalf.

Distinctive projects and technical ideas

• Voice agents should complete actual tasks. Floyd used personal context to interpret requests, initiate calls, and sustain conversations, while reactive database subscriptions streamed transcripts and status updates without polling. Its demonstrations included simulated calls to a school and a flower shop.

• Latency shapes conversational usability. Redman traced delays across transcription, model inference, speech synthesis, and audio transport, noting that longer conversation histories could slow responses. A prerecorded introduction bought time for the first generated reply; direct-audio models remained a potential improvement, not an implemented feature.

• Useful autonomy requires visible boundaries. Floyd disclosed its AI identity and ended conversations when it lacked essential information. Redman explicitly identified missing authentication and inadequate protection against adversarial instructions as reasons the prototype was unsuitable for production.

• AI coding tools still require engineering judgment. In an experiment using Cursor, Claude, and Convex, Redman built a social-media scheduling prototype while emphasizing that experience remained necessary to catch errors and assess production readiness. He published the experimental source code.

• Midpoints turns embeddings into a playable product. Building on a colleague’s original concept, Redman developed Midpoints, a word game that asks players to identify terms semantically positioned between two prompts.

Better Email’s public company domain now points to VIBES, an AI marketing assistant for real estate agents.