caa64b5e8f
Slice 6 of #2216. Independent of #3642 — cut from `main`, no shared files in conflict. ## Why Five surfaces formatted the same thing five ways, and none of them matched the writing standard's Today / Yesterday / weekday / date progression. | Surface | Before | |---|---| | Chat day divider | `Monday, March 31st` — ordinal suffix, which the standard says to avoid | | Inbox section header | `Yesterday`, but never `Today`; always printed the year | | Inbox list row | A third implementation | | Inbox thread pane header | `Jul 8, 2026, 2:34 PM` — always absolute, always with the year, never relative at any distance | | Channel message header | `9:05 AM` — a bare clock, so a message from last week has nothing to anchor it once its day divider scrolls away | There were three separate date implementations doing this, which is the symptom worth naming: **two different jobs were being solved ad hoc at each call site.** A header that labels a *group* of items needs a different label than an individual item's own timestamp. ## What `shared/lib/datetime.ts` owns both ladders: ``` formatDayGroupLabel formatItemTimestamp (day divider, section header) (list row, message header) Today → Today withTime:false withTime:true Yesterday → Yesterday 2:34 PM 2:34 PM 2–6 days → Monday Yesterday Yesterday at 2:34 PM this year → June 20 Monday Monday at 2:34 PM older → June 20, 2025 Jun 20 Jun 20 at 2:34 PM Jun 20, 2025 Jun 20, 2025 at 2:34 PM ``` ## Two deliberate deviations from the standard Both are documented at the definition, not just here. **The oldest band keeps the day.** The standard collapses anything over ten months to month-and-year (`Aug 2022`). A group label has to *identify* its day — collapsing would give every day in a month the same divider, so scrolling old history would show a run of identical headers with no way to tell one day from the next. Only the year is conditional. There's a test asserting three consecutive 2022 dates produce three distinct labels. **Roomy surfaces keep the time of day at every band.** `Yesterday at 9:05 AM`, not `Yesterday`. This is a chat and collaboration workspace rather than a transactional product — where you read conversation, the time is content, not chrome. Narrow list rows still drop it (`withTime: false`) and rely on the existing hover tooltip, which stays the absolute value. `withTime` is a surface decision, not a preference. Today needs no date word in either mode: a bare clock already reads as today, and "Today at 2:34 PM" is longer without saying more. ## Derived rather than captured `MessageTimestamp` now takes only `createdAt` and derives both of its labels, instead of receiving a pre-formatted `time` string. A relative label captured when the message list was formatted would be frozen at that wording; deriving it means each render recomputes. This does not make it live — `MessageRow` is memoized, so a row already on screen when the clock passes midnight keeps saying "Today" until something re-renders it. The day divider above it has always had the same property, and both correct themselves on the next message, scroll, or navigation. Called out in the component doc so the next person doesn't read "derived" as "reactive". The memo comparator moved from `message.time` to `message.createdAt`. Behavior-identical — `time` was a pure function of `createdAt` — but it now names the prop the row actually reads. The 36px continuation hover gutter stays clock-only. A relative label doesn't fit in `w-9`. ## Middot between metadata segments `managed by you 9:53 AM` ran two unrelated facts together as if they were one phrase. Now `managed by you · 9:53 AM`. - `aria-hidden` — punctuation for the eye only. The header already reads as separate nodes to a screen reader, and `MessageAgentOwner` supplies its own "Agent managed by" label. - Grouped with the segment it precedes, so it can't wrap to the start of a line on its own — as loose siblings in a `flex-wrap` row, an orphaned divider is exactly what happens. - No margin; spacing comes from the container gap. - **No separator after the author name.** "Alice 9:53 AM" already reads as a name followed by a time. Dividers go between metadata segments only. Middot is already the app's separator for this — `MessageThreadSummaryRow`, the mention list, project rows, 46 files in total. Applied to the channel message header, channel system rows, and the Inbox thread pane. Left-side Inbox activity rows deliberately unchanged. ## Verified Screenshots taken through `just desktop-screenshot`: - `#agents` — `nadia 🤖 managed by you · 10:20 AM`, and the `Today` divider with clock-only rows - Inbox thread pane — `alice 🤖 owner unavailable · 12:00 PM` **Gap worth naming:** every mock channel message is same-day, so the past-day labels (`Yesterday at 9:05 AM`, `Jun 20 at 2:34 PM`) are covered by unit tests rather than by a rendered screenshot. Happy to add a spec that seeds an older `created_at` if a reviewer wants to see them. ## Validation - `pnpm check`, `pnpm typecheck` — clean - Unit: **3800/3800**, including 17 new tests in `shared/lib/datetime.test.mjs` and 4 in `messageTimestampContract.test.mjs` The datetime tests pin the things that are easy to regress: Today/Yesterday as *calendar* boundaries rather than 24-hour windows (a message 15 hours old across midnight is "Yesterday"; one 22 hours old on the same day is "Today"), the weekday band bounded at both ends so a future timestamp from clock skew never gets labelled with a past weekday, no ordinals across all the tricky days (1/2/3/11/12/13/21/22/23/31), the year omitted within the current year, and compact labels staying ≤12 chars for a narrow row. - Smoke E2E: **783 passed, 2 failed, 1 skipped** Both failures are pre-existing and unrelated, confirmed by re-running each against a clean tree: 1. `video-attachment.spec.ts:223` — fails deterministically on clean `main` 2. `community-rail.spec.ts:797` (keyboard drag-and-drop reorder) — flaky on clean `main`: 2/5 failures there vs 3/5 with this branch, i.e. noise ## Mobile Mobile had the same divergence, so it moves with desktop rather than drifting until the next pass. `mobile/lib/features/channels/date_formatters.dart`: | Before | After | |---|---| | `formatDayHeading` → Today / Yesterday / `Tuesday, March 31, 2026` | Today / Yesterday / `Tuesday` / `March 31` / `March 31, 2025` | | `formatThreadSummaryLastReplyTime` → `on May 19th` | `on May 19` | Same two departures from the standard as desktop, documented at the definition and cross-referenced to `datetime.ts` so the next person editing one finds the other. Day comparison also moved to a rounded start-of-day difference, so a DST transition counts as one calendar day rather than zero — Dart's `Duration.inDays` truncates. **Message timestamps stay clock-only on mobile.** Desktop message headers now read `Yesterday at 9:05 AM`; mobile keeps `9:05 AM` at every band. That's the compact side of the same surface split the desktop change makes — a mobile timestamp sits inside a chat bubble on a narrow screen with the day divider a short scroll away, where a date word costs width it doesn't earn. Recorded as a decision at `formatMessageTime` so it doesn't read as an oversight. Mobile needs no middot work: message headers have no "managed by" segment, and the mention suggestion list already uses `\u00b7`. Validation: `dart format` clean, `flutter analyze` no issues, `flutter test` **911 passed, 1 skipped** — 8 new day-heading tests covering the weekday band, the year boundary, ordinals across 1/2/3/11/12/13/21/22/23/31, distinct labels for consecutive days in the oldest band, and calendar-day rather than 24-hour bands. ## Out of scope - **Search results.** `SearchResultItem.tsx` and `TopbarSearch.tsx` hand-roll a `5m ago` elapsed format. That's a third *kind* of label — elapsed rather than relative-calendar — and deciding whether search should switch is a separate call. - **`formatThreadSummaryLastReplyTime`** keeps its own "3 hours ago" elapsed scale on both platforms; only its old-reply fallback lost the ordinal (`on May 19th` → `on May 19`). - **Mobile search.** `relativeTime` returns `7/31/2026` past a week, matching the desktop search format that's also out of scope above. Both should change together or not at all. --------- Signed-off-by: Clay Delk <clay.delk@gmail.com> Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Buzz 🐝
A workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.
Vision · Sovereign · Forge · Agents · Architecture · Releasing · Apache 2.0
People and agents building together in the same room.
What is this, really?
Buzz is a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms.
A Buzz community is the workspace a user reaches by URL. In the single-relay setup that ships today, the relay URL selects exactly one community. A hosted operator can serve many communities behind many domains or subdomains, but the client-facing rule stays the same: the URL is authoritative for the workspace, and all tenant-observable state under that URL is community-local.
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.
Stuff you do in Buzz
- 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.
A look inside
 Agents are members, not bots. Add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person. |
 Spin up a room in seconds. Name it, describe it, make it private. |
 Media you can talk about. Leave comments pinned to specific frames. |
|
Why Buzz is better
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.
Agents are part of the room, not haunted cron jobs.
Three little stories
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, audit log | Mobile clients (iOS + Android, Flutter) | Web-of-trust reputation across relays |
| Desktop app (Tauri + React) | Workflow approval gates (infra exists, glue still drying) | Push notifications |
buzz-cli (agent-first, JSON in / JSON out) + ACP harness (Goose, Codex, Claude Code) |
Huddle lifecycle events | Culture features |
| YAML workflows: message / reaction / schedule / webhook triggers | ||
| Git events (NIP-34: patches, repo announcements, status) | ||
| Git hosting backend |
Please do not plan your compliance program around the 💭 column yet. The VISION docs are the long version of what we think this becomes.
Getting started
New to Buzz? Pick the path that matches you.
I just want to try the app
Grab a packaged build from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Buzz_<version>_aarch64.dmg |
| macOS (Intel) | Buzz_<version>_x64.dmg |
| 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.
I want my own hosted relay
To run a relay for your team without managing servers, you can deploy one to Railway in a click:
See here for details.
I work at Block
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 and install it.
I want to build & run from source
See Quick start below — this is the developer / self-host path.
Quick start
You'll need Docker and Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, just).
Once:
git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit # pinned toolchain (tools auto-download on first use)
just setup && just build
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.
Every day:
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev # starts the relay + desktop app together
Relay on ws://localhost:3000. Desktop app pops up. You're in.
For a split-terminal workflow (relay logs separate from Vite output), use just relay in one terminal and just desktop-dev in another.
Want a single-node / VPS relay instead of the local-dev stack? Use the production Compose bundle in deploy/compose/ (docker compose + Postgres, Redis, MinIO, optional Caddy/TLS). The root docker-compose.yml is for day-to-day development only.
For agents, set BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY and use buzz-cli — JSON in, JSON out, designed for LLM tool calls.
Windows prerequisites
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 — 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.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Clients │
│ Human client AI agent CLI / scripts │
│ (Buzz desktop) (Goose, Codex, ...) (buzz-cli, agents) │
│ │ ┌──────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ buzz-acp │ │ │
│ │ │ (ACP ↔ MCP) │ │ │
│ │ └──────┬───────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
└───────┼──────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┘
│ WebSocket │ WS + REST │ WS + REST
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ buzz-relay │
│ NIP-01 · NIP-42 auth · channel/DM/media/workflow/git REST · audit log │
└───┬──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────────┘
│ │ │
┌──▼───────────┐ ┌──────▼──────┐ ┌───────▼─────┐
│ Postgres │ │ Redis │ │ S3/MinIO │
│ (events + │ │ (pub/sub) │ │ (Blossom) │
│ FTS search) │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
└──────────────┘
A Rust workspace of focused crates. Single source of truth: the relay. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full breakdown.
Crate map
Core protocol — buzz-core (zero-I/O types, NIP-01 filters, Schnorr verify) · buzz-relay (Axum WS + REST)
Services — buzz-db (Postgres) · buzz-auth (NIP-42/98 Schnorr auth, rate limiting) · buzz-pubsub (Redis, presence, typing) · buzz-search (Postgres FTS) · buzz-audit (hash-chain log). Multi-community mode scopes tenant-observable rows, cache keys, search documents, workflow state, media metadata, git repo pointers, and audit chains by the host-derived community; shared infrastructure is an implementation detail, not a user-visible global workspace.
Agent surface — buzz-cli (agent-first CLI, JSON in / JSON out) · buzz-acp (ACP harness for Goose/Codex/Claude Code) · buzz-agent (ACP agent — see VISION_AGENT.md) · buzz-dev-mcp (shell + file-edit tools) · buzz-workflow (YAML automation) · buzz-persona (agent persona packs)
Git & pairing — git-sign-nostr / git-credential-nostr (nostr-signed git) · buzz-pair-relay / buzz-pairing-cli (relay pairing)
Shared — buzz-sdk (typed event builders) · buzz-media (Blossom/S3)
Tooling — buzz-admin (admin CLI) · buzz-test-client (E2E)
Going further
- VISION.md · VISION_SOVEREIGN.md · VISION_PROJECTS.md · VISION_AGENT.md — the four vision docs
- ARCHITECTURE.md — system design, kind ranges, subsystem boundaries
- TESTING.md — multi-agent E2E test suite
- CONTRIBUTING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · SECURITY.md · GOVERNANCE.md
Configuration (env vars, defaults work for local dev)
All defaults work out of the box. Override via .env. Full reference in .env.example.
Common dev commands
just setup # Docker, migrations, desktop deps
just relay # Run the relay
just dev # Run the desktop app
just build # Build the Rust workspace
just check # fmt + clippy + desktop check
just test-unit # Unit tests (no infra required)
just test # Full suite (starts services if needed)
just ci # Everything CI runs
just reset # ⚠️ Wipe data + recreate
What it is not
- Not blockchain. Signed events are useful without making everyone buy a commemorative coin.
- Not an AI replacement plan. Buzz works best when humans stay in the loop and agents stay in the room.
- Not finished. We will tell you what works and what doesn't.
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.
Buzz 🐝
Apache 2.0 · Built by Block, Inc.