What is Buzz? Block's open-source workspace where agents are members
Buzz launched July 2026: chat, git, and AI agents in one app, on a Nostr relay you can self-host. Every agent signs its own work with its own key. What ships today, and what's still early.
Buzz is an open-source team workspace from Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, launched July 21, 2026 under Apache-2.0. The pitch is team chat, git hosting, and AI agents in one app, built on the Nostr protocol: the repo’s own line is “a workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.” Its distinctive idea is identity. Agents aren’t bots holding a borrowed API token: every human and every agent gets its own cryptographic keypair and signs every message, commit event, and approval, so authorship is verifiable in one shared audit log. It ships desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, self-hosts via Docker Compose, and is early software: v0.4.x within weeks of launch, mobile clients still being wired up.
What Buzz replaces, and what it keeps
Buzz aims at the Slack-plus-GitHub pair for software teams that work with agents. Channels and DMs carry the conversation; git events ride the same relay via Nostr’s NIP-34 (patches and repo announcements); and agents sit in the member list next to people. The engineering choice underneath is what makes it more than a mashup: everything is a signed Nostr event on a relay, meaning one identity model and one event log for chat, code review, and agent actions alike. Signing uses BIP-340 Schnorr keys, the relay authenticates members with NIP-42, and media rides the Blossom protocol. A workspace runs on a single relay, which the docs treat as the source of truth. Relay-to-relay federation isn’t there yet, so “decentralized” today means you can own the server, not that workspaces mesh.
Agents as members, not bots
On Slack or Discord, a bot is an app wearing a vendor token, and every message routes through the platform’s servers. Buzz’s model is different in kind: an agent holds its own private key, signs its own events, and builds its own history. The repo puts it as agents having “their own keys, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail.” That makes authorship checkable (this suggestion came from that agent, cryptographically) and gives compliance-minded teams a real answer to “who did what.” The flip side is key custody: whoever holds an agent’s key is that agent, so the key becomes a production secret to store and rotate like any other.
Which agents can join
Buzz is deliberately harness-agnostic. It ships integrations for Claude Code, Codex, and Goose (Block’s own open-source agent), and beyond those, its buzz-acp bridge seats anything that speaks the Agent Client Protocol in a channel. That’s how Nous Research’s official Hermes integration works: mint the agent a Nostr keypair, register it as a relay member, and the bridge connects a channel to a running Hermes process, including one already living on a server elsewhere, which keeps its memory and skills and simply gains a new surface. The practical consequence: one #engineering channel can hold a human, Hermes doing orchestration, and Claude Code writing patches, each signing its own work.
Running it: self-host or desktop
The repo’s paths as of August 2026: desktop builds (Tauri-based) for macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, Linux x86_64 as AppImage or .deb, and Windows x64 (the Windows build still unsigned); self-hosting via Docker Compose or a one-click Railway deploy; mobile apps marked in-progress. Take the version numbers at face value: this launched weeks ago, moved through v0.4.x fast, and is published openly rather than polished. Teams evaluating it are evaluating a direction, not a finished Slack replacement.
Why it’s worth watching from the agent-hosting side
Buzz is the strongest statement yet of a shift this whole space is making: agents as standing colleagues with identity rather than chat commands with API keys. That framing assumes what it doesn’t say: a colleague has to be somewhere. An agent that holds a key, keeps memory, and answers in channels at 3am is a process on a computer that stays on, whether that’s a workstation, a VPS, or a managed box. And if you run the relay yourself, that’s a second always-on service with the same backup and patching duties as anything else you host. The workspace makes agents feel like teammates; the infrastructure underneath is still yours to provide.