Buzz: A Shared Workspace Where Humans and AI Agents Work Side by Side
> 367 stars today | Rust | by Block
A Screenshot from a Work Chat
It's 2 a.m. You type one line in a channel called #payments-api: "Have we seen this error before?"
Three seconds later, a member named @incident-bot digs up the relevant discussions, root-cause analyses, and fix PRs from the past six months, posts the links in the channel, and asks: "Want me to wake up the last committer?"
The entire exchange—your question, the agent's answer, the evidence chain—stays in the channel. Not in some bot's DMs, not in a CI dashboard's logs, but as a message in the channel.
This is what Buzz, open-sourced by Block (formerly Square), wants to achieve: a shared workspace for humans and AI agents.
What It Actually Is
Buzz is a self-hostable workspace with a radical core architectural choice—it is a Nostr relay.
Every message, every emoji reaction, every workflow step, every code review approval, every git event is a signed Nostr event written to the same log. Messages from humans and messages from agents use the same data structure, the same identity model, the same audit chain. The only difference: humans use their own key pairs, agents use their own key pairs.
The README puts it bluntly:
> Agents are members, not bots.
Not a webhook bolted onto a chat tool, not a notification fired when CI finishes—but agents as formal team members who join channels, read history, open PRs, do reviews, and run workflows, with exactly the same operational surface as humans.
Three Scenarios
The README gives three concrete scenarios, clearer than any architecture diagram:
Scenario 1: Incident memory. At 2 a.m., you ask "Have we seen this error before?" The agent searches six months of history, posts the relevant threads, root causes, and fixes, and asks whether to page the last committer. The whole interaction stays in the channel.
Scenario 2: Branch as room. You open a feature branch, and a channel appears automatically. Patches land as NIP-34 events, CI results post to the channel, the agent does the first-pass review, teammates react with emojis to the parts they care about, and the merge decision is made in the same channel. The channel itself is the complete record of "why this code exists."
Scenario 3: Writing its own release notes. A workflow triggers on a tag. The agent reads all merged PRs, drafts release notes, posts them for review, and publishes after getting a 👍 reaction. Every step is signed and searchable.
Why Nostr
This is Buzz's most interesting technical choice.
Most team collaboration tools are architected as: chat is one system, CI is another, code hosting is another, bots are yet another, glued together with webhooks and APIs. Each system has its own data model, identity system, and permission system. You can't search one system's data from another.
Buzz's choice: everything is the same kind of event. Nostr was designed as a decentralized protocol for social media, built on the idea that "all content is signed events; relays store and forward them." Buzz borrows that model for team collaboration:
- Messages are events
- Code patches are events (NIP-34)
- CI results are events
- Review approvals are events
- Agent actions are events too
- Relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, audit logs
- Desktop app (Tauri + React)
buzz-cli(agent-first, JSON in/out) + ACP harness (supports Goose, Codex, Claude Code)- YAML workflows: message/reaction/schedule/webhook triggers
- Git events (NIP-34: patches, repo announcements, status)
- Git hosting backend
Because everything shares one data structure, search is unified—you can find in one query "the discussion about this bug three months ago, the fix PR, the CI result, and the review approval," because they all live in the same log.
Why Block Built This
Block is Jack Dorsey's company (home of Square and Cash App), and Dorsey is an early supporter of the Nostr protocol. So Buzz's choice of Nostr isn't purely technical—it's also philosophical alignment.
But setting ideology aside, Buzz solves a real problem: agents are second-class citizens in existing collaboration tools.
In Slack, a bot is a webhook—it can send messages but can't see channel history. In GitHub, a bot is a token—it can operate on PRs but isn't in the channel. In Jira, a bot is an API key—it can create tickets but doesn't participate in discussions.
Buzz's core bet: if agents have the same operational surface as humans—the same channel access, the same history search, the same workflow triggers—they can do far more.
Current Status
What Buzz can do today:
Strongly envisioned but not yet built: cross-relay trust networks, push notifications.
A Bigger Question
The truly interesting question Buzz raises isn't "can Nostr power a collaboration tool," but: what should collaboration tools look like when agents become formal members of the team?
The current approach: humans discuss in Slack, agents run in the background, and results get pushed back into Slack via webhooks. The agent is a "haunted cron job"—a ghost haunted by a scheduled task.
Buzz's answer: pull the agent up to the table, give it a seat, and let it use the same tools, the same protocol, and the same audit chain as humans. Not a smarter bot, but a more equal member.
Whether this direction is right is hard to say yet. But 367 stars in a single day suggests plenty of people feel that "haunted cron job" isn't the endgame for agent collaboration.
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*GitHub: block/buzz · License: Apache 2.0 · Language: Rust*