3ffbfa693c
## What
A kind:9007 can now name the channel's first members with `p` tags.
Those members are added in the same database transaction that creates
the channel. Resending a create whose OK was lost is now accepted
instead of refused.
## Why
Starting a new Solo chat today takes about 6–8 sequential relay round
trips before the first message goes out: create, read, add each agent
(kind:9000), read the roster, then send. With members in the create, a
client can start a chat with its agents as two writes: the create, then
the message as soon as the create is OK.
The resend fix makes the create safe for an outbox to retry. Today an
identical resend after a lost OK is refused with `duplicate: channel
already exists`, so the client can't tell success from a real UUID
collision.
## How
- **buzz-db:** `Db::create_channel_with_event` writes the channel, its
owner, its members (role `member`, `invited_by` = creator) and the 9007
event itself in one transaction. A channel row therefore never exists
without its create event. `create_channel_with_id` is unchanged for its
other callers.
- **Validation** (`side_effects::initial_members` and the
`validate_admin_event` 9007 branch):
- Each `p` must be a 32-byte hex pubkey.
- Duplicates and the creator are dropped.
- At most 32 members.
- An `h` tag is required when there are members.
- Each member goes through the same `decide_channel_add_policy` check a
kind:9000 uses, so an agent that refuses third-party adds keeps the
whole create out.
- **Side effects:** each initial member gets the same `member_joined`
system message and member-added notification a kind:9000 would post. The
fallback in `handle_create_group` creates a bare channel when the
pre-created row is missing; it announces no members, because it added
none.
- **Resend:** when the UUID is already taken, the same transaction
checks whether this exact event is the stored create.
- If it is, the create is OK'd as `duplicate:` (it is the same signed
create).
- Anything else, including a changed create from the same author, is
refused and writes nothing, so it can never re-run side effects or
announce members.
- A resend that arrives while the first create is still uncommitted
waits on its channel insert. It is confirmed once the first commits, or
creates the channel itself if the first rolled back. Before this, a
resend in that window was refused, and the app then withdrew a chat that
existed.
- **No compensation:** ingest no longer soft-deletes a pre-created
channel when the event insert fails. The rollback covers it.
- **Announcements:** a failed `member_joined` notice for one initial
member is logged at `error` and the loop continues, so the members after
it still get theirs. A resend writes nothing, so nothing would retry
them.
## Compatibility
A 9007 with malformed `p` tags, or more than 32 of them, used to be
accepted with the tags ignored. It is now rejected with `invalid:`. The
relay's own SDK and CLI builders send no `p` tags on 9007.
## Out of scope
- The kind:9000 OK still doesn't prove the membership change committed:
side-effect failures are logged and OK'd, and a duplicate replay skips
side effects. The new path doesn't depend on kind:9000.
- Events in separate HTTP requests are still unordered. Clients send the
first message after the create's OK.
## Tests
`store::channel::postgres_tests` (buzz-db):
- `a_resend_beside_an_open_create_confirms_it_once_committed`: holds a
create open, checks that the resend waits, commits, and expects `Exists
{ resent: true }` with one owner and one member.
- `a_resend_beside_a_failed_create_creates_the_channel`: the same, but
the first create rolls back.
- `a_create_whose_event_fails_leaves_no_channel`: an event the insert
refuses leaves no channel row, and a retry creates the channel.
- `another_create_for_a_taken_channel_writes_nothing`.
Two mutations, each caught: committing the channel before its event
fails the "leaves no channel" test, and looking up the event before the
channel insert waits fails the "confirmed once committed" test.
`handlers/create_with_members_postgres_tests.rs`, all through the real
ingest path:
- `create_adds_its_p_tags_as_members` checks:
- the roles and the 39002 roster
- exactly one `member_joined` notice
- that the agent can post with no separate add
- `create_respects_the_members_add_policy`: an agent with policy
`nobody` gets an `invalid:` rejection, and no channel is created.
- `resending_a_create_confirms_it`:
- an identical resend is accepted
- a changed create (from the creator or from someone else) is refused
- the roster is unchanged and nobody new is announced
- Unit tests for `initial_members`: dedupe, creator excluded, bad hex,
the 32-member cap, and the missing `h` tag.
Each new test was mutation-checked against the change it covers: no
members, no policy check, refuse every resend, and let a changed creator
create through. Each mutation turns its test red.
Agent exercise on a local relay, over `POST /events` the way the app
sends:
- The 9007 with `p` = agent was accepted in 54–97ms (debug build).
- The kind 9 was accepted 12–15ms after the create's OK.
- The agent was in the 39002 roster, and the operator listener delivered
the mention.
- An identical resend came back `duplicate:` (accepted), and a changed
create was refused.
Local suite runs at 10adcf6dd (the transaction fix), on PG14:
- `postgres-test-run.sh -p buzz-relay -p buzz-db`: 28 failures. That is
the same 27 as below, plus `personal_read_frontier_is_monotonic…`, which
hit a statement timeout under load and passes when run alone.
- `cargo test -p buzz-db -p buzz-relay`: the same 6 `api::media`
failures and the flaky `mesh_demo` test.
Earlier local suite runs:
- New tests pass and clippy is clean.
- `postgres-test-run.sh -p buzz-relay -p buzz-db`: 27 failures
(partition maintenance, a huddle links test, a redis boot test), and the
same 27 fail on a96ace4e5.
- `cargo test -p buzz-relay`: 6 `api::media` failures (they need a DB at
the default URL) also fail on base.
- One `api::mesh_demo` test is flaky: it passed 2 of 3 branch runs and
failed once on a timeout.
🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)
---------
Signed-off-by: Bradley Axen <baxen@squareup.com>
Co-authored-by: mbot <3754f8729004d95654c46dbab3129e4ab9ef05cc2534e2a3fbfc155983bd637b@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: claude00 <fb8b76a01257932b8ca35060862c29bd09b2137638573731c2d5074fc02c5385@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: ART <ea39c1c8acf57180161ef4ba4ed68abf8589f5291956b909a5aa991fc66664ca@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
Community
- Buzz feedback community — ask questions, share feedback, and connect with other Buzz users
- @buzzdotxyz on X — news and updates
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.