▟ block/buzz
A hive mind communication platform — a workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms, every action a signed Nostr event
★ 10.6kRustblock/buzz

The short version: Block open-sourced Buzz on July 21, 2026 — a workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms (chat, code review, CI, canvases, voice), and every action is a Schnorr-signed Nostr event in one append-only log. The point isn't that it replaces Slack and GitHub. The point is the identity model: an agent signs its own work the same way you sign yours, so "who did this, and can you prove it" has an answer built into the substrate instead of stitched together after the fact. It's Apache-2.0, self-hostable, and free.

What it is#

Buzz is, on the surface, a fused Slack-and-GitHub for teams that include AI agents as members rather than bolted-on bots. In one app your team can open repositories, submit and review code, run workflows, edit shared canvases, orchestrate other agents, and drop into voice huddles. It even ships a built-in software forge over standard Git Smart HTTP, so an organization can host its repos inside Buzz with no separate GitHub account.

Under the surface it's a Nostr relay (written in Rust) with TypeScript/React desktop clients. That choice is the whole story, and it's the next section.

The idea worth stealing: one signed log#

Here is the primitive founders should pay attention to even if they never install Buzz. Every action — a message, a reaction, a workflow run, a code review comment, a git event — is a signed event in one log, and every event is verified with the same Schnorr signature check "regardless of whether the author is human or [an] automated process." Patches, CI results, review comments, and merge decisions are all stored as signed Nostr events alongside the human discussion that produced them.

What that buys you is a tamper-evident chain of custody for mixed human/agent work, for free. In the normal stack, that provenance is scattered: some of it lives in Slack history, some in GitHub's audit log, some in your CI logs, and none of it is cryptographically linked or attributed to a specific agent key. When an agent merges a change or approves a spend and someone later asks which agent, acting on whose instruction, with what it saw — you're reconstructing a story from three systems. Buzz makes that one query against one signed log.

That's the same instinct behind the signing work we've covered lately — giving agents real, verifiable identities, signing agent requests with Web Bot Auth, and being deliberate about what to log when your agent spends money. Buzz is the maximalist version: don't log the audit trail, make the workspace itself the audit trail.

Who it's for, and the agents it runs#

Buzz is built by Block, Inc. — the same company behind Goose, its open-source agent framework (released January 2025, now past 50,000 GitHub stars). Goose connects into Buzz as one of three native coding-agent harnesses; the workspace also ships pre-built harnesses for OpenAI Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, wired in through an ACP harness (buzz-acp). There's also buzz-cli, an agent-first CLI with a plain JSON in/out interface for driving the workspace programmatically.

So you're not locked into Block's own agent. If your team already runs Claude Code or Codex, Buzz is a place to put them where their work is signed and auditable next to yours.

Getting started#

It's free and Apache-2.0. Fastest path from a clone to a running relay plus desktop app:

git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just setup && just build
just dev   # starts the relay + desktop app

Prefer a split-terminal workflow:

just relay          # Terminal 1 — the Nostr relay
just desktop-dev    # Terminal 2 — the client

Requirements are Docker plus Hermit, or if you'd rather bring your own toolchain: Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, and just. Don't want to build? Grab a prebuilt release from GitHub — macOS .dmg, Linux .AppImage/.deb, Windows .exe. Local defaults work out of the box; the relay listens on ws://localhost:3000, and you point clients elsewhere by setting BUZZ_RELAY_URL in a .env file (.env.example is copied for you during setup). You can self-host the relay or use Block's managed version.

The honest read#

Buzz is v0.4.21 — new, and moving fast. And it makes a real bet: Nostr, a decentralized-identity substrate most engineering teams have never run in anger. That's the source of both the upside (portable, cryptographic, vendor-neutral agent identity) and the risk (one more piece of unfamiliar infrastructure to operate and reason about).

The founder move is to pilot, not migrate. If you're running agents that write code and touch money, the signed-event audit trail is worth a serious look — it solves a problem you will otherwise be building yourself in six months. Put it on one repo, wire in the one coding agent you already trust, and see whether "the workspace is the audit log" holds up against how your team actually works. Adopt the primitive first; the platform can follow.