Will PflegerandGitHub
f35930104b
Desktop input latency regressed sharply for users on v0.5.9 and worsened on latest main: multi-second stalls when clicking back into the app, slow fresh boots, intermittent lockups, and scroll/mouse degradation. Reverting to `119a84897` (pre-0.5.9) was confirmed to resolve it, isolating the regression to that range. Profiling a live production renderer plus a commit-level audit of the range found three independent, additive causes — fixed here — plus a long-standing `get_channels` cost that made every remaining refetch expensive, also addressed here. ## 1. Focus-return refetch storm (`refetchOnWindowFocus`) #5490 wired TanStack's `focusManager` to app focus and flipped ~20 query sites to `refetchOnWindowFocus: true`. A focus return after >60s away fires them all within milliseconds — and a click into an unfocused window *is* a focus return, so the burst runs before the click is processed. That is the "click into the composer, wait 5 seconds" symptom, and it also explains why mouse input feels worse than keyboard (clicks arrive with focus transitions; typing happens while already focused). A 5-second `sample` of a live production renderer caught a single window activity-state transition consuming ~1.25s of main-thread time, dominated by `JSON.parse` in the focus listener's microtask drain. #5535 already established the fix pattern but applied it to only two families (channels, home-feed). This PR extends the same 5-minute `staleTime` discipline to the remaining families: pulse (×5), workflows (×4), agents (×4), forum (×2), presence, user-status, custom-emoji, channel-templates, and the persona catalog. Polling cadences and push-invalidation paths are untouched — interval refetches and `invalidateQueries` both bypass `staleTime`, so live-update behavior is unchanged. Each gated family exports its focus-refetch policy as an options object that the production hook spreads into `useQuery`, and a `focusRefetchPolicy.test.mjs` drives a `QueryObserver` with that same production object — locking the policy behaviorally (fresh focus return → 0 fetches; stale → refetch) and failing if a hook's `staleTime`/`refetchOnWindowFocus` wiring drifts. Four families deliberately keep tighter freshness, all surfaces where the 5-minute gate would suppress the only refresh path and none of which feed the app-wide storm: `repo-sync-status` keeps its fresh focus refetch (its inline comment documents the "committed in a terminal, switched back to the app" flow as intended); the workflow-runs list stale-gates at 10s because a remotely-started run has no push invalidation and its conditional 1s poll is off while the cache shows no active runs; the workflow list queries (`useChannelWorkflowsQuery` and the all-channels aggregate) stale-gate at 10s because they have no poll and no relay subscription, and mutation-driven invalidation only covers this renderer — remote workflow creates/edits/deletes surface only via focus refetch; and the managed-agent log stale-gates at one poll tick (30s) so returning to a live agent log refreshes immediately. Run approvals keep the 5-minute gate under `RUN_APPROVALS_FOCUS_STALE_TIME_MS` — their focused 10s poll already covers freshness. ## 2. Synchronous localStorage sweep on the boot/focus path #5453's stale-cache sweep synchronously `getItem` + `JSON.parse`s every whitelisted localStorage entry on the main thread (multi-MB on seasoned profiles), scheduled with a `requestIdleCallback` timeout of 1.5s that guaranteed it landed mid-boot, and re-armed on every hidden→visible transition — stacking it onto the exact moment the focus storm fires. #5454's `trimSelfProfileCaches()` additionally scanned every localStorage key on every `writeSelfProfileCache()` call (which fires per relay self-profile delivery at boot). Now: the first sweep waits `BOOT_SWEEP_FLOOR_MS` (30s) after startup, the scan is time-sliced across idle callbacks, and the visibility trigger is removed — boot-delayed plus hourly still covers the 14-day TTL contract. The sliced sweep re-checks staleness immediately before each removal (a key rewritten fresh mid-sweep survives), isolates per-key storage errors so one bad entry can't strand the rest of the snapshot, defers oversized values once rather than parsing them on a zero-budget slice, guarantees forward progress on timeout-fired callbacks, and cancels its scheduled slice when stopped. The profile trim keeps a lazily-initialized memoized key count so the common under-cap write is O(1); the full parse scan runs only when the count exceeds a cap, resyncs if external deletions made it stale, and a failed scan skips the trim instead of aborting the write. Sweep semantics (rules, TTLs, eviction) are unchanged, and tests cover the scheduling, slice-progress, error-isolation, defer-once, and trim short-circuit behaviors. ## 3. The macOS window was never opaque #5478's glass appearance is correctly opt-in at the CSS layer, but the compositor cost was baked in deeper than its native `on_webview_ready` transparency call: the main window is declared `"transparent": true` in `tauri.conf.json` (added for the original glass work in #1671), which makes tao call `NSWindow.setOpaque(false)` at creation and resolve every later `set_background_color(None)` to `clearColor` — and no runtime `setOpaque(true)` path exists through tauri, while wry's runtime background setter can only force the WKWebView's `drawsBackground` off, never back on. So "restore the platform default" was unreachable: every launch, glass or not, ran with a non-opaque NSWindow, defeating WindowServer's opaque-window compositing fast path and forcing full window compositing every frame — compounded by the existing `backdrop-blur` chrome overlapping the scrolling timeline. This matches the compositor-shaped symptoms (scroll and pointer input degrading first). The window is now created opaque (`"transparent": false`) and the NSWindow layer is never made transparent at runtime. Glass never needed a transparent window: behind-window `NSVisualEffectView` vibrancy renders inside opaque windows (this is how Finder and Notes draw vibrant sidebars); it only requires a transparent WKWebView canvas, which the `set_window_vibrancy` enable path already establishes at runtime (`macos-private-api` compiles that in independent of the window flag). Enabling glass installs the vibrancy layer and then makes only the webview canvas see-through; disabling clears the vibrancy layer — the canvas may stay non-drawing afterwards (wry's flag is one-way at runtime), which is harmless because glass-off CSS paints fully opaque above an always-opaque NSWindow. The boot-path first-frame backing writes touch only the NSWindow backing color and are therefore inert to glass state regardless of how they order against the `ThemeProvider`'s vibrancy call on a persisted-glass-on cold boot. Glass-off users (the default) get an end-to-end opaque window from boot for the first time. ## 4. `get_channels`: serial round-trips and a multi-MB payload on every refetch The stale gates in (1) cut refetch frequency; this cuts the cost of the refetches that legitimately remain (boot, and focus returns after more than 5 minutes away — previously still a multi-second stall). `get_channels` made ~8 fully serial relay round-trips (~3.2–3.6s at 1,100+ channels), then shipped the full `ChannelInfo` list — including every channel's member pubkeys — across IPC, where the renderer's `JSON.parse` of the multi-MB payload froze the main thread (the ~1.25s stall captured in the live sample). - **Concurrent stages**: the membership chain, the open-channel directory scan, and the hidden-DM snapshot run concurrently, as do the member-count and last-message queries that follow. The critical path drops from ~8 sequential round-trips to 2 phases. Filters, limits, pagination, and merge semantics are unchanged. - **Not-modified short-circuit**: the command now takes a client-supplied content hash (FNV-1a 64 over the channel list, canonicalized by id and excluding `last_message_at`) and omits the channel list from the response when nothing else changed. Last-message timestamps — which change on nearly every message anywhere — ship as a small separate map that the client overlays onto its cached list with reference preservation, so React Query's structural sharing also skips downstream re-renders. On a typical refocus the renderer parses kilobytes instead of megabytes. The hash is stored in the query cache itself, tying its lifecycle to the data it describes so a community switch can never leak a stale hash. The E2E mock bridge speaks the new payload shape — including the complete `last_messages` map the client treats as authoritative — and hash canonicalization plus overlay reference-preservation are unit-tested on both sides. --------- Signed-off-by: Will Pfleger <pfleger.will@gmail.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.