2f3dd850db
Pinky, an AI agent, updated this description on Wes's behalf after
taking over the startup investigation.
**Category:** fix
**User Impact:** An EVENT refused by WebSocket admission or handler
saturation receives a correlated `OK(event_id, false, reason)` instead
of an uncorrelated NOTICE, so the client can settle that refusal without
waiting for its publish timeout. Rate-limited refusals also arm client
backoff. This fixes a protocol failure mechanism; it does not establish
that every startup send will succeed or that the reported Desktop
startup incident is fully resolved.
**Problem:** Startup opens several live subscriptions and publishes at
once, and the relay's WebSocket admission gate is a fixed 5-second
window (`ws_admission_budget` = `human_ws_events_per_sec * 5`). If that
shared per-principal quota is exhausted, `enforce_ws_admission`
previously rejected an EVENT with a bare `["NOTICE", reason]`. Quota
pressure is a possible trigger, not proof of the original incident's
complete cause.
A NOTICE carries no event id. Both clients settle a pending publish
*only* from an `OK` keyed by event id (desktop `pendingEvents`, mobile
`_pendingEvents`), so nothing settled — and `handle_text_message`
returns early, so no `OK` ever followed either. The send **could not
fail**; it could only time out at `PUBLISH_TIMEOUT_MS` = 25s. That
explains how this rejection mechanism can produce a roughly 25-second
timeout; attributing the original report to it still requires the actual
startup/send workflow.
The handler-semaphore saturation path had the identical defect, and that
one needs no quota burst to fire.
**Solution:** NIP-01 gives each request type its own acknowledgement
channel, and a rejection is only actionable on the same one. Reject a
REQ with `CLOSED`, an EVENT with `OK(id, false, reason)`, and fall back
to `NOTICE` only where no per-request correlation exists. COUNT refusals
now also use `CLOSED(query_id, reason)` per NIP-45, covering both quota
admission and handler saturation (added in
`cd12c93804b87a24b61075dfd171dc471a0a527f`).
Reason strings are unchanged, so the `rate-limited:` prefix and `retry
in {N}s` hint that existing client gates parse keep working (desktop
`parseRateLimitHint`, mobile `RelayRateLimitGate`, buzz-acp
`set_rate_limit_gate`). Only the frame *type* changes, so
`docs/multi-tenant-relay.md` L7 stays satisfied.
Two notes on how this landed, both worth a reviewer's attention:
1. **A survived mutation became a design change.**
`send_admission_result` originally took a `RejectionTarget` parameter,
and reverting the *second* call site (the per-minute message quota)
survived the whole suite — with Redis unreachable the first quota check
short-circuits, so that line is unreachable in test. Rather than test
around it, the parameter is gone: the target is derived from the frame,
so no call site can name the wrong channel.
2. **The relay fix would have caused a client regression on its own.**
Gate arming lived only in the NOTICE branch. Once rejections arrive as
`OK:false`, `handleOk` failed the send without ever backing off — the
client would retry straight into the same quota. Desktop and Mobile now
arm on a `rate-limited:` OK rejection. ACP was subsequently fixed in
`3b06dd32493596ec650f20abf8805791c50fdc24`: it arms the gate and
re-parks only the refused observer frame, preserving other in-flight
frames. Desktop gets `activateRateLimitIfSignalled` as the single owner
of that prefix test, called from both `handleOk` and the NOTICE branch.
<details>
<summary>File changes</summary>
**crates/buzz-relay/src/rejection.rs** (new)
Owns the admission-rejection concern: `RejectionTarget`,
`rejection_target_for`, `request_rejection_message`,
`send_admission_result`, and `enforce_ws_admission`, moved out of
`connection.rs`. Six tests, two of which drive the real
`enforce_ws_admission` against a real `AppState`.
**crates/buzz-relay/src/connection.rs**
Fix the EVENT handler-semaphore rejection to correlate to the event id;
delegate admission to the new module. Add two tests that drive the real
`handle_text_message` with every handler permit held. Down from 1319 to
1116 lines.
**crates/buzz-relay/src/state.rs**
Widen the existing `test_state` helper to `pub(crate)` so the rejection
tests reuse it rather than adding a ninth copy of `AppState`
construction.
**desktop/src/shared/api/relayRateLimitGate.ts**
Add `activateRateLimitIfSignalled` — one owner for the `rate-limited:`
prefix test, since three inbound frame types now carry it.
**desktop/src/shared/api/relayClientSession.ts**
Arm the gate on a rate-limited OK rejection; route the NOTICE branch
through the same helper. Net zero lines, which keeps this
already-oversized file within the differential ratchet.
**desktop/src/shared/api/relayClientPublishRejection.test.mjs** (new)
Four tests against the real `RelayClient`: a rate-limited OK settles the
pending publish and arms the gate; an ordinary rejection does not arm
it; an accepted OK still resolves.
**mobile/lib/shared/relay/relay_session.dart**
Arm the gate in `_handleOk` for a rate-limited rejection.
**mobile/test/shared/relay/relay_session_test.dart**
Two tests driving the real `publish` + `debugHandleMessage` path.
</details>
<details>
<summary>Validation</summary>
**Mutation-tested — 5 mutations, all now killed.** Each production call
site was reverted to the defective behaviour to confirm a test fails.
This caught two false-negative tests:
| # | Mutation | Result |
|---|----------|--------|
| 1 | `rejection_target_for`: EVENT → `Connection` | 4 tests fail |
| 2 | EVENT handler-semaphore call site → bare NOTICE | **survived at
first** |
| 3 | per-minute quota call site → `Connection` | **survived**; fixed by
removing the parameter |
| 4 | desktop `handleOk` gate arming removed | 1 test fails |
| 5 | mobile `_handleOk` gate arming removed | 1 test fails |
Mutation 2 is the lesson: my first saturation test called
`request_rejection_message` directly, so reverting the real call site
inside the `match` arm left it green. It now drives
`handle_text_message` itself and dies on that mutation.
- `cargo test -p buzz-relay` — 928 passed, 1 failed:
`api::mesh_demo::tests::demo_join_forwarded_arm_round_trips_echo`,
**pre-existing**, reproduced with all changes stashed at `4dd4d73de`.
- `cd desktop && npm test` — 5721 passed, 0 failed (full suite).
- `cd mobile && flutter test` — 1876 passed, 0 failed (full suite).
- `just fmt-check`, `just clippy`, `just desktop-check`, `just
mobile-check`, `just file-size-check` — clean. Desktop's 5 biome
warnings are pre-existing (reproduced with changes stashed).
- All 9 pre-push lanes green, including `rust-tests` and
`desktop-tauri-checks`.
**Not verified:** not reproduced end-to-end against a live relay under a
forced quota burst. The causal chain is source-proven and
mutation-proven at the frame level; the ~25s attribution follows from
`PUBLISH_TIMEOUT_MS` but is not directly measured. A packaged-build
click-through would close that gap.
</details>
Related work: #6957 bounds Desktop HTTP event submission, but safe
retained-operation recovery after exhausted/ambiguous outcomes remains
unfinished. #6998 is the separately reviewable Desktop
readiness/duplicate-subscription slice. Neither is claimed to complete
native before/after startup-send validation.
Diagnosis note: `RESEARCH/DESKTOP_STARTUP_SEND_STALL_2026_08_27.md`
(Brain's workspace).
## Current review disposition (2026-08-28)
The [review on
`cd12c938`](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/6961#pullrequestreview-5052902510)
identified ACP's missing rate-limited-OK handling. Commit
`3b06dd32493596ec650f20abf8805791c50fdc24` fixes gate arming, re-parking
the specifically refused observer frame, and the stale NOTICE comment.
Two regressions drive the real frame dispatcher. See [the implementation
and validation
response](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/6961#issuecomment-5455032054).
The Mobile generation-check inline thread is resolved: its `async
publish` returns a failed Future when superseded; it does not throw
synchronously at invocation. No further production change was indicated
by that comment.
The validation counts above describe the original slice, not a new
rerun. At `3b06dd324`, the current GitHub check rollup has successful
completed test/build checks (non-applicable jobs skipped). The
security-review comment still requires review for the current base/head
range; do not read a green authorization job as a completed security
review. Approval and merge remain human decisions.
---------
Signed-off-by: Brain <1a02c72794dcd0f07058a353bc3a81f4028b8c77c92c87fce6d5c8b85970a20b@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Signed-off-by: Wes <wesbillman@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Brain <1a02c72794dcd0f07058a353bc3a81f4028b8c77c92c87fce6d5c8b85970a20b@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: Carl <9d00794d3df50972eb8b615511783cab12a77a8fd5dd5edd58073ec73b54bd8b@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
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.