How Jack Dorsey’s Open‑Source Buzz Lets Humans and AI Agents Work as Equals

Block announced Buzz, an open‑source collaboration platform built on the Nostr protocol that unifies human users and AI agents in a single workspace secured by cryptographic keypairs. Each participant—human or agent—holds its own public‑private key, enabling clear authorization and accountability at the protocol level.

Buzz is deliberately model‑agnostic: any agent that implements the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) can be plugged in, whether Claude Code, Codex, Goose, or a custom implementation. The platform therefore focuses on coordination rather than on any specific large‑language model.

In Buzz, AI agents are treated as full collaborators rather than passive assistants. They can open repositories, submit patches, run authorized workflows, edit canvas content, join voice huddles, create channels, and coordinate other agents, all with the same permission interfaces as human teammates.

The system stores Git repositories as immutable, content‑addressed packfiles with a mutable manifest pointer. Pushes write objects first, then atomically advance the pointer via a compare‑and‑swap operation, making each commit a single, verifiable event. This storage protocol is formally specified and model‑checked in TLA+, and back‑ends must pass consistency test suites before integration.

Buzz’s architecture is a Rust workspace whose core relay service ( buzz-relay) runs on Postgres for event storage, Redis for pub/sub, Typesense for search, and S3/MinIO for media and Git object storage. Agent‑side tooling includes the JSON‑oriented CLI ( buzz-cli) and the ACP bridge ( buzz-acp) for connecting Goose, Codex, Claude Code, etc.

The project is released under the Apache‑2.0 license, with all code, protocol specifications, security documentation, and TLA+ models publicly available on GitHub (github.com/block/buzz). While the hosted version (buzz.xyz) offers a ready‑to‑use instance, teams can self‑host by following the repository’s setup instructions (Docker, Hermit, or a Rust/Node environment).

Block acknowledges that Buzz is still early‑stage: the relay is a single‑point authority, cross‑relay trust is not yet implemented, and features such as mobile clients, push notifications, and advanced workflow approvals are in progress. The README provides a maturity matrix indicating which components are production‑ready and which are still under development.

Overall, Buzz serves as a concrete engineering experiment for the hypothesis that AI agents can replace hierarchical coordination, offering a unified, searchable, signed event log where humans and agents collaborate as peers.