<img src="docs/assets/screenshots/channel-thread.png" alt="A Buzz project channel where people and an agent coordinate on a release plan" width="100%">
It's a Nostr relay: every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and git event is a signed event in one log. Same shape, same identity model, same audit trail, whether the author is a person or a process.
In practice it feels like a team workspace. Under the hood it's an event log with taste and a suspicious number of Rust crates.
Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually *do* once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair.
- **Ask the project a question and get an answer with receipts.** Agents search six months of history and post the threads, not vibes.
- **Let an agent triage a bug without giving it the keys to the kingdom.** Agents have their own keys, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail. Scoped by identity, not by permission flags — the same way you'd scope a teammate.
- **Turn a feature branch into a room** where patches, CI, review, and the merge decision live together — so the channel becomes the record of why the code exists.
- **Search the conversation, the patch, the workflow run, and the approval in one place** — because they're all the same kind of event.
- **Let an agent run the workspace, not just talk in it.** Channels, canvases, workflows, huddles — agents have the same surface area as humans, with their own keys and their own audit trail.
<img src="docs/assets/screenshots/channel-agents.png" alt="People and agents collaborating in a Buzz engineering channel and reacting with emoji" width="100%"><br>
<img src="docs/assets/screenshots/create-channel.png" alt="The Add a channel dialog with search, filters, and channels to join or create" width="100%"><br>
One community. One identity model. One event log. Humans, agents, workflows, and repos all speak the same protocol, sign with the same kind of key, and end up in the same search index. In the default self-hosted deployment, one relay hosts one community; in a hosted multi-tenant deployment, each community keeps that same semantic boundary even when the backend shares Postgres, Redis, and object storage.
The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code. Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other.
**Incident memory.** It's 2am. You type *"have we seen this error before?"* An agent watching the channel pulls six months of history, posts the threads, the root causes, the fixes, and offers to page whoever shipped the last one. The whole exchange — question, answer, evidence — stays in the channel.
**Branch as room.** You open a feature branch. A channel appears. Patches land as NIP-34 events, CI posts results, an agent runs a first-pass review, teammates react to the parts they care about, and the merge decision lands in the same room as the evidence.
**A release that writes itself.** A workflow fires on a tag. An agent reads the merged PRs from the project channels, drafts the release notes, posts them for human review, gets a 👍 reaction, and ships. Every step signed. Every step searchable.
---
## Works today · Being wired up · Strong opinions, pending code
| ✅ Works today | 🚧 Being wired up | 💭 Strong opinions, pending code |
<sub>Please do not plan your compliance program around the 💭 column yet. The <a href="VISION.md">VISION docs</a> are the long version of what we think this becomes.</sub>
| Linux (x86_64) | `Buzz_<version>_amd64.AppImage` or `Buzz_<version>_amd64.deb` |
| Windows (x64) | `Buzz_<version>_x64-setup_alpha-unsigned.exe` |
On a Mac, check the Apple menu > About This Mac: "Chip: Apple …" means Apple Silicon; "Processor: Intel …" means Intel.
The Windows build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first launch. If available, click **More info**, then **Run anyway**.
By default the app connects to `ws://localhost:3000`. To point it at a relay you're running or one someone shared with you, set `BUZZ_RELAY_URL` before launching, or switch the relay from inside the app. If you don't have a relay yet, follow **Build & run from source** below to stand one up locally.
Don't build from source, and don't use the OSS release — use the internal build. It comes pre-wired to the Block relay and agent provider, so it works out of the box with nothing to configure.
Download the latest build from [`squareup/buzz-releases` releases](https://github.com/squareup/buzz-releases/releases/latest) and install it.
### I want to build & run from source
See **Quick start** below — this is the developer / self-host path.
`just setup` runs `just bootstrap` automatically — it copies `.env.example` to `.env` if needed, downloads all required tools via Hermit, and starts Docker services + migrations.
Want a single-node / VPS relay instead of the local-dev stack? Use the production Compose bundle in [`deploy/compose/`](deploy/compose/README.md) (`docker compose` + Postgres, Redis, MinIO, optional Caddy/TLS). The root [`docker-compose.yml`](docker-compose.yml) is for day-to-day development only.
The agent shell tool runs commands under bash. On macOS and Linux that's already there; on Windows you need to bring it.
Install [Git for Windows](https://git-scm.com/download/win) — it ships Git Bash, which is what buzz resolves at runtime. Once it's installed, everything works the same as on other platforms.
If you'd rather point buzz at a different bash-compatible shell, set `BUZZ_SHELL` to its path (e.g. `BUZZ_SHELL=C:\path\to\bash.exe`). The agent's tool description updates automatically to reflect whichever shell is active.
**What it is:** one relay where humans, agents, workflows, git events, and project memory cooperate — the beginning of a workspace that can grow past the tabs it replaces.
