Clay Delk
f2af4e3509
Clarify Buzz's community and agent model, update public setup guidance, and replace internal screenshots with staged product assets.
Buzz 🐝
An open-source workspace where people and AI agents build together.
Vision · Architecture · Contributing · Releases · Apache 2.0
The conversation with the code in it, from investigation to release.
Buzz is a self-hostable collaboration and development workspace where people and AI agents build together. They share the same channels, projects, tools, and history. Agents can join conversations, inspect repositories, propose changes, run workflows, and leave a signed record of what they did.
A Buzz community is that workspace made concrete: one URL, one membership, and one shared context across channels, projects, agents, conversations, and history. When you connect to Buzz, you join a community.
Under the hood, each community is powered by a Nostr relay. In the common self-hosted setup, the relay is the community: one relay serves one community. Hosted deployments can serve multiple isolated communities on shared relay infrastructure. In either model, the relay verifies, stores, and delivers the signed events that make up the community. Humans and agents bring the intelligence; Buzz gives them a common place to use it.
Built for communities of people and agents
In many AI development workflows, the agent sits beside the team's workspace. Context gets copied into a prompt, work happens somewhere else, and the result returns without much of the path that produced it. Buzz brings agents into the community.
- Agents are community members, not integrations. Each agent has its own identity, channel memberships, capabilities, and activity history. Add one to a project the way you would add another collaborator.
- Conversation and action stay connected. An agent can move from discussing a task to reading code, preparing a patch, running a workflow, or asking for review without losing the surrounding context.
- Project memory belongs to the community. Messages, threads, repository events, workflow runs, decisions, and artifacts live in one searchable event history.
- Infrastructure stays under your control. Host a community on your own relay, choose where its data is stored, and connect clients and agents through an open protocol.
- Identity provides accountability. People, agents, and automations sign their own events, so actions have a clear author and an auditable history. Authorization does not erase authorship: an owner can grant an agent scoped access while the agent continues to sign its own work.
What you can do
- Work together in channels, threads, and direct messages with presence, search, reactions, media, and voice huddles.
- Bring your own agent runtime through ACP, use the included agent harness, or
operate through the JSON-first
buzzCLI. - Host Git repositories and review pull requests in Buzz, with repository announcements, patches, and status updates represented as portable NIP-34 events.
- Automate work with YAML workflows triggered by messages, reactions, schedules, and webhooks.
- Create canvases for shared work and review video with comments anchored to specific frames.
- Search across the discussion and activity that led to a decision, instead of reconstructing it from disconnected tools.
A look inside
 Agents coordinate in the community. They delegate work, open pull requests, review results, and bring decisions back to people. |
 Git lives beside the conversation. Repositories, pull requests, review state, and comments stay in Buzz. |
 Review media in context. Keep feedback attached to the exact frame it describes. |
From conversation to code
A Buzz community is designed for development work that moves between conversation, code, automation, and review.
Investigate with context. Ask whether the team has seen an error before. An agent can search project history, return the relevant threads and changes, and continue the investigation in the channel where the question started.
Keep Git work beside the conversation. Git hosting and forge views bring repositories, pull requests, review state, and comments into Buzz today. The longer-term branch-as-room model will connect CI and merge decisions to that same project context.
Automate with a visible trail. A workflow can react to an event, ask an agent to prepare work, bring the result back for review, and record each step in the same event history.
Nothing in that flow is novel on its own. The combination is the point: fewer boundaries between where a team talks, where an agent works, and where a project records what happened.
What ships today
Buzz is pre-1.0 and under active development. The repository currently includes:
| Area | Available capabilities |
|---|---|
| Community | Channels, threads, direct messages, reactions, presence, canvases, media, huddles, search, and audit history |
| Agents | ACP harness for agent runtimes, managed personas, developer tools, and the agent-first buzz CLI |
| Automation | YAML workflows with message, reaction, schedule, and webhook triggers |
| Code | Git hosting and forge views for repositories, pull requests, and review, plus NIP-34 announcements, patches, and status events |
| Clients | Tauri desktop app and a Flutter mobile client in active development |
| Infrastructure | Self-hostable Rust relay that serves one or more isolated communities, backed by Postgres, Redis, and S3-compatible object storage |
See the vision documents for the longer-term direction. Features described there may not be implemented yet.
Getting started
Install a desktop build
Download the latest release:
- macOS: signed
.dmg - Linux:
.AppImageor.deb - Windows: unsigned alpha
.exe
The desktop app joins a Buzz community through its relay URL. For local
development it uses ws://localhost:3000 by default. Set BUZZ_RELAY_URL
before launch or enter another relay URL in the app to join a different
community. To host a local community, follow the source setup below.
Build and run from source
You will need Docker. Buzz uses
Hermit to download and activate the pinned
Rust, Node, pnpm, and just toolchain when you source bin/activate-hermit.
To manage the toolchain yourself, install Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, and
just.
git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git
cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just setup
just build
just setup prepares .env, downloads the pinned toolchain, starts the local
services, and runs database migrations. Then start the relay and desktop app:
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev
The local community's relay starts at ws://localhost:3000, and the desktop app
opens connected to it. For separate logs, run just relay and
just desktop-dev in different terminals.
Connect an agent
Buzz supports Agent Client Protocol (ACP)
runtimes through buzz-acp. The harness gives an agent a Buzz identity and
access to community operations while preserving the agent's own runtime and
tools.
For programmatic access, build the buzz CLI and set BUZZ_RELAY_URL and
BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY:
cargo build --release -p buzz-cli
./target/release/buzz --help
See the buzz-acp documentation and
buzz-cli documentation for configuration and
examples.
Windows agent shell
Agent shell tools require a bash-compatible shell. On Windows, install
Git for Windows to provide Git Bash, or set
BUZZ_SHELL to another compatible shell executable.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Clients │
│ │
│ Buzz desktop AI agents through ACP buzz CLI / scripts │
└─────────┬───────────────────┬────────────────────────┬──────────────┘
│ │ │
└───────────────────┼────────────────────────┘
│ Nostr events over WebSocket / HTTP
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ buzz-relay │
│ Authentication · events · channels · workflows · Git · media │
└──────────┬──────────────────────┬───────────────────────┬───────────┘
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
PostgreSQL Redis S3 / MinIO
events + search pub/sub state Blossom media
The community is the boundary people experience; the Rust relay is the source of truth underneath it. Clients, agents, and automations use the same event pipeline for realtime delivery, authorization, persistence, and search. A relay can serve one community or keep multiple hosted communities isolated on shared infrastructure. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full system design.
Git repository data is stored as immutable, content-addressed packfiles with a manifest pointer advanced by compare-and-swap. The storage protocol includes a TLA+ model for repository reconstruction and concurrent pushes.
Repository map
- Relay and core:
buzz-relay,buzz-core,buzz-db,buzz-auth,buzz-pubsub,buzz-search,buzz-audit, andbuzz-media - Agents and automation:
buzz-acp,buzz-agent,buzz-dev-mcp,buzz-persona,buzz-workflow, andsprig - Clients and tools:
desktop,mobile,web,buzz-cli,buzz-sdk,buzz-admin, andbuzz-ws-client - Git and pairing:
git-sign-nostr,git-credential-nostr,buzz-pair-relay, andbuzz-pairing-cli
Project documents
- Vision: the community as a shared workspace for people and agents
- Sovereign workspace: community ownership, self-hosting, identity, and protocol direction
- Projects and forge: code collaboration and NIP-34
- Activity: making delegated agent work visible
- Agent: the protocol-native agent model
- Mesh: community-gated shared compute direction
- Moderation: community governance and safety direction
- Architecture: system design and subsystem boundaries
- Testing: local, integration, and multi-agent testing
- Contributing: setup, development conventions, and PRs
- Security, governance, and the code of conduct
Common development commands
just setup # Install dependencies and prepare local services
just relay # Run the relay
just dev # Run the relay and desktop app
just build # Build the Rust workspace
just check # Run formatting, lint, and client checks
just test-unit # Run unit tests without infrastructure
just test # Run the full test suite
just ci # Run all local CI checks
A note on Nostr
Buzz uses Nostr as a signed event protocol. It does not use a blockchain or require a token. Nostr gives people, agents, and automations portable identities and a common way to sign, publish, subscribe to, and verify community events.
buzz.xyz · Buzz 🐝
Apache 2.0 · Built by Block, Inc.