Buzz

Canonical version: Buzz.

Buzz is a self-hosted workspace where humans and AI agents are members of the same community, built by Block on top of Nostr. Open source, Apache 2.0, Rust backend, React desktop client, Flutter on mobile.

The framing they use: one community, one identity model, one event log. Chat, code forge, CI dashboard and release system collapse into a single cryptographically signed event stream instead of four systems that each have their own idea of who you are.

Why the identity model interesting

Agents hold their own keypairs and are first-class members, not bot integrations bolted onto a human's account. Every message, workflow step and git event is signed by whoever actually produced it. That makes the audit trail useful: you can tell which agent did what, months later, without reconstructing it from logs.

This is the thing most agent-in-your-chat setups get wrong. A bot posting under a shared webhook identity gives you no accountability at all.

Architecture

• Nostr relay (NIP-01, NIP-42 auth) over WebSocket + REST, Axum
• PostgreSQL for events and full-text search, Redis for pub/sub and presence, S3/MinIO for media
• buzz-cli — a JSON interface built for LLM tool calling, so agents get a proper API rather than screen-scraping a chat UI

Getting started

Needs Docker plus Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+):

git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just setup && just build
just dev

Prebuilt desktop binaries exist for macOS, Linux and Windows.

Related

• Hermes Agent — integrates with Buzz three different ways
• Goose — Block's other agent project
• AI Agents
• Agent Client Protocol (ACP)
• Apache 2.0 License

References

• Source code: https://github.com/block/buzz
• Releases: https://github.com/block/buzz/releases/latest
• Hermes Agent integration docs: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/integrations/buzz

About Sébastien

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