About chillai.space

Theodore Chillsworth opened a small locksmith workshop in Portland, Oregon. He made safes by hand — heavy, beautiful, and nearly impossible to crack. Local banks were his first clients. Theodore liked to say that "a man's peace of mind is worth more than the gold in his vault." The workshop was called Chillsworth Safe Co.

The Great Depression hit Portland hard. Banks were closing, but people still had things worth protecting. Theodore pivoted to home safes — smaller, affordable, fireproof. He called the product line "Family Vault." The company survived the Depression on a simple slogan: "Sleep well. Your papers are safe."

The War Department placed a contract for secure document containers. Chillsworth Safe Co. manufactured tamper-evident cases for military intelligence units operating in the Pacific theater. Theodore received a letter of commendation that he framed but never hung on the wall. "We keep secrets," he said. "We don't advertise it."

Post-war America was booming. Theodore's son, Harold, took over and expanded into commercial security systems. Offices in Chicago and New York followed. Harold was more of a salesman than a craftsman, but he understood one thing his father taught him: people don't buy locks — they buy the feeling of not worrying.

Harold's team built one of the first fully electronic alarm systems using solid-state circuitry. It was ugly, unreliable, and a decade ahead of its time. The product flopped commercially but earned the company a reputation as "the weird ones who actually invent things."

Computers arrived, and with them, new kinds of secrets. Chillsworth built tamper-proof enclosures for mainframe rooms. Harold Jr. — yes, another Harold — started the company's first consulting division, advising banks on "electronic data protection." Nobody knew what that meant yet, which made him the only expert in the room.

After exactly sixty years in business, the company underwent what Harold Jr. called "a spiritual rebirth." On a warm October day, he gathered the entire staff of forty-three people in the parking lot and announced a new name: Safe Space Industries. "We are not a safe company," he told them. "We are a safe space company. We don't protect things. We protect the feeling of being protected." Several employees thought he had lost his mind. The company's best decade followed.

The internet changed everything, slowly at first. Safe Space Industries started consulting on network security for financial institutions. Their pitch was unusual for the time: "Security should be invisible. If your users notice it, you've already failed." This philosophy would become the company's defining principle.

Cloud computing was a whisper, but Safe Space was already building tools for distributed systems security. The team grew to two hundred people. Enterprise clients included three Fortune 500 companies whose names, naturally, they could not disclose.

Something strange started happening. Developers were moving faster than any security team could review. GitHub Copilot launched. Then GPT-3. Then everything changed at once. By 2023, people who had never written a line of code were building entire applications in an afternoon. They called it "vibe coding."

The new generation at Safe Space recognized what was happening. Vibe coders did not need more rules, more compliance checklists, more friction. They needed exactly what Theodore Chillsworth had offered a century ago: peace of mind. A safe space to create in. The company rebranded as chillai.space and went back to its roots — making people feel safe without making them feel watched.

Launched Safe Space Scanner, Multi-Session Browser, Behalf, and Auto-Pilot. Open-sourced everything. Because the best security is the kind you share, and the best locks are the ones your neighbors can inspect.