Jack Dorsey Launches Buzz to Merge Team Chat, AI Agents, and Git Hosting

> Explain Like I'm 5

> Buzz is an open-source, self-hosted workspace that combines team chat, AI agents and Git hosting using signed Nostr events, so teams can keep control of their data.

Very different expectations of 5-year-olds.

[I work for Slack, opinions very much my own]

Having agents see everything you and your colleagues see is cool.

The challenge comes when you want to make certain things private to certain people. In that world you don’t want multiplayer agents leaking data, so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.

Single-player agents, on the other hand, are much more straightforward — they act on a single user’s behalf, and then the challenge is ensuring the single-player agent cannot exfiltrate private data into a shared space unless the user specifically permits it.

Now when I see new software projects I just think of how much of them are made with agents and the unreliability/easy abandonment that comes with it. Ten years ago this product would have been of a known quality. Not saying anything about buzz specifically.

Google Buzz [1] along with Wave you both were too soon for this world.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

Disclaimer that I used to work at Slack

I love that we're challenging the status quo in chat. It feels like we've settled into an eternal September of sorts. I am somewhat bearish that Slack and Teams will survive, or rise to, the agent era.

That said, I'm curious whether NOSTR is really the protocol for this. For some really large corporations you're looking at a lot of clients (and their shadows like cellphones, local agents etc) as well as a lot of (likely) team-based agents.

The identity architecture makes sense for centrally hosted agents. Users also probably have their own personal agents as well. Do those just reuse user credentials or are they differentiated in some way? I couldn't tell.

I also am curious whether git really needs to be a dependency here. Like, maybe for Block it does, but it introduces a lot of complexity that I feel could be exported to merging VCS Host events to the Buzz event log.

I'm also curious what challenges will arise as new capabilities emerge. For instance, both Sol and Claude can now render native components in my chat window which is a massive leg up in terms of firming up a design change.

Rust is also a choice. I'm curious what alternatives the team considered and how they landed on Rust.

Bots in team chat is not a bad idea. I've been experimenting with that for a few months.

We started with Slack. This kind of works but dialing in the gazillion of permissions needed to end up with something that works is a bit painful. And you have to do this over and over again for each new bot.

So, we started experimenting with self hosted alternatives. First we tried Matrix. It's nice but a bit too strict on end to end encryption which gets in the way if you actually want to share information with bots. So, a few weeks ago we switched to Zulip. That's pretty straightforward to setup as well. It's very easy to create bot users with both and create some automations. We did some with Openclaw and I ended up replacing those with something coded around the haystack framework, which is a bit less of a messy basket case than Openclaw.

And as I discovered after I installed it, the Zulip leadership actually just got hired by Anthropic. It seems Jack Dorsey beat them to market making some announcements but I imagine that Anthropic might have very similar plans.

IMHO team level use cases for agents actually make a lot of sense. Companies are run by groups of people and the larger those groups the more team overhead you get. Perfect for optimizing with AI. And if you have people doing a lot of stuff with AI, that only adds to the need for them to communicate what they are doing and coordinating with others. Doing that out in the open in some shared channel makes a lot of sense. And ha […]

Slack exists largely because IRC was insufficient. It didn't natively support channel history, search, etc.

For AI agents to flourish, Slack has to either truly open its network with a protocol or eventually be replaced.

I'd like to see Slack embrace an AT protocol-based chat system, which then apps like Buzz could implement. Then users could log in with domain handles like @yourname.com, and agents could use handles like @agent1.yourname.com, all under their complete control.

This could fill a useful niche. However I would assume Anthropic and OpenAI are going to build their own and steamroll in 6-12 months.

I did a dive recently on git forges for agent swarms. Radicle lacks an identity layer, the federated/COB model seems good. Tangled has no private repo story, though the social layer is solid; they also have an (IMO) awkward modeling of Issues as tweets at her than being owned by the repo.

So I think there is an opening for a private agent-first forge. (Before the HN dogpile, assume that if you don’t buy the value of agent swarms, you can ignore this whole thread.)

My concern for this project - Anthropic is explicitly building in this direction. Their latest product is Tag which is an auth model for running agents async within Slack. The obvious next feature to build from there is the forge; if GitHub gets disintermediated by the Agent UI, then Anthropic are free to swap out their own implementations behind the scenes. Multiplayer chat and repo/project management seem like the obvious next platform pieces to me. (This goes for any SaaS subscription of course, follow it to the N-hop logical conclusion.)

Incredible. I don't think I've ever had the displeasure of visiting a website that has half a second of cursor movement lag before.