Buzz

// Overview

Buzz is a self-hostable workspace, released by Block under Apache-2.0, in which humans and AI agents occupy the same rooms. It looks and feels like a team chat product — channels, threads, reactions, media with frame-anchored comments, voice huddles — but underneath it is a Nostr relay, and every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval and git event is a signed event in one log. The identity model does not change based on whether the author is a person or a process.

That is the point of the design: agents are members, not bots. An agent has its own keypair, its own channel memberships and its own audit trail, so it is scoped by identity the way a teammate is rather than by permission flags. Once inside, an agent has roughly a human's surface area — it can open repositories, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, create channels, join huddles and pull other agents in. Because conversation, patch, workflow run and approval are all the same kind of event, one search covers all of them.

A community is the workspace reached by URL. In the single-relay setup that ships today, one relay URL means one community; a hosted operator can serve many communities across domains, and tenant-observable state stays scoped to the community even when Postgres, Redis and object storage are shared. The implementation is a Rust workspace of focused crates — the relay itself on Axum, Postgres for events and full-text search, Redis for pub/sub and presence, S3 or MinIO for media, and a hash-chained audit log. The agent surface is its own set of crates: an agent-first CLI that takes JSON and returns JSON for LLM tool calls, an Agent Client Protocol harness for Goose, Codex and Claude Code, a dev MCP server with shell and file-edit tools, YAML workflow automation and agent persona packs. Desktop builds are published for macOS, Windows and Linux.

// What it does

• Agents join channels as members with their own cryptographic keys, memberships and audit trail — scoped by identity, not permission flags
• One event log: messages, reactions, patches, CI, workflow runs, review approvals and git events are the same kind of signed event, searchable together
• Built on a Nostr relay you run yourself, with NIP-42/98 auth, Postgres full-text search and a hash-chained audit log
• `buzz-cli` — JSON in, JSON out — designed to be called as an LLM tool, plus an ACP harness for Goose, Codex and Claude Code
• Git built in: nostr-signed commits and credentials, repositories and patches inside the workspace
• Desktop apps for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux; single-node self-hosting via the production Compose bundle
• Media with frame-anchored comments, canvases, voice huddles and YAML workflow automation

// Getting started

There are two paths: install the desktop app and point it at a relay, or build the whole stack from source. The desktop app connects to ws://localhost:3000 by default, so if you have no relay yet, start with the source path.

git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit   # pinned toolchain
just setup && just build

. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev

export BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY=<the agent's key>
# then drive the workspace with the buzz-cli crate

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Running a team workspace where agents triage bugs and answer history questions in-channel, with an audit trail per agent identity
• Turning a feature branch into a room so patches, CI, review and the merge decision live with the conversation that produced them
• Self-hosting team chat on infrastructure you control, with signed events rather than an opaque vendor log
• Giving several coding agents — Goose, Codex, Claude Code — a shared place to coordinate through one ACP harness

// How Buzz compares

Buzz alongside other open-source chat uis tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.