4da7264d90
## Problem Observer telemetry is the noisiest client of the relay: the old pacer (167ms spacing + 90/min rolling cap) let a busy session bill up to 6 events/second against the owner's message quota, and the rolling cap silently *dropped* frames once exceeded. Ruling from the rate-limiting investigation thread (channel `826fc99b-1472-40e7-a529-6b9db8943b8c`): pace at 1/s, always emit, minimal PR. **Review round 1 (Max, Sami)** found the first cut wrong in three ways — tick burst (all pending frames per tick), startup burst (`interval` fires at t=0), and per-channel quota arithmetic. All fixed and mutation-verified in round 1. **Review round 2 (Sami, Max)** found two more against the round-1 head: 1. **Drain-rate collapse (Sami, blocker):** front-run-only packing meant a frame held ONE event whenever channels interleaved — measured 275 B/s vs 63.5 KB/s, so an ordinary 2-channel session fell minutes behind with zero drops and no warning. Silent unbounded latency. 2. **Coalescer byte-cap bypass (Max):** chunks pending in `ObserverChunkCoalescer` were unbounded and outside the 4 MiB cap — 500 distinct-`messageId` 50KB chunks retained ~48MB with `pending_bytes == 0` and zero drops. **Review round 3 (Max)** found the drop accounting undercounted merged chunks: a coalescer entry that merged N same-`messageId` chunks counted as **1** in `dropped_events` when evicted (50 merged 1KB chunks evicted → counter read 1, 49 generated events unaccounted). Fixed: accounting is now denominated in **source (generated) observer events** end to end — each pending entry tracks how many chunks it absorbed, eviction charges that count, and the count survives flush into the publish FIFO. **Review round 4 (Sami, Max)** found three more against the round-3 head: 1. **Coalescer byte undercount (both, independently):** a pending merged entry retains its first chunk's text **twice** until flush — once inside the serialized event skeleton and once in the extracted text accumulator — but was charged only `serialized_len`, so true retention overshot the 4 MiB cap ~2× (measured 8.3 MB). Fixed: `push_pending` charges `serialized_len(&event) + text.len()`. 2. **Cap regressions asserted the accumulator against itself,** which is how the undercount hid. All three cap tests now assert on independently **walked** retained bytes (`serialized_len` per FIFO entry + `serialized_len + text.len()` per coalescer entry), with a secondary `accumulator >= walked` sanity check. Reverting the fix makes them fail at exactly 8,328,386 / 8,328,272 bytes. 3. **FIFO-arm source accounting was implemented but untested (Sami M13; Max reproduced at `cc9333b7c` with 102/151):** the round-3 regression only evicted a merged entry while still in the coalescer. New test forces a merged entry (50×1KB, `source_events=50`) through flush into the publish FIFO, then evicts it from there — mutating the FIFO eviction to `dropped += 1` fails with the reviewers' exact numbers (102 vs 151). **Review round 5 (Sami 9/9/9, Max 9/9/9)** — production judged merge-safe by both; remaining items are tests only, all landed at `63d821620`: 1. **The walker instrument was itself unverified (Sami M17–M20; Max independently confirmed the `return 0` mutant survives):** every cap test asks `walked_retained_bytes()` only for `<= CAP`, so a blinded walker passes everything — and paired with a reverted `push_pending` fix the two mutations cancel, hiding exactly the 8.3 MB overshoot it exists to detect. New two-sided pin: the walker must SEE the first chunk's text twice, and must agree with the accumulator EXACTLY while both stores are non-empty. Kills M17, M18, M19, M20. 2. **Two pre-existing snapshot-clone siblings (Sami D5b/D5c; byte-identical at merge-base `7334ad1e1` — not this PR's regression, but the PR made the class visible):** aliasing the inner turns map leaks a post-save turn into the snapshot; aliasing the inner tombstones map leaks a post-save terminal that blocks a legitimate post-restore resurrection. Two isolation tests with in-test controls — all three inner-map clones in `saveActiveAgentTurnsForCommunity` are now pinned. ## Change **Harness (`crates/buzz-acp`)** - **Global pacer: AT MOST ONE relay frame per second**, regardless of channel count or backlog size. `interval_at(now + 1s)` restores the no-startup-burst property; `MissedTickBehavior::Skip` is now pinned by a paused-time test (a stalled tick arm fires one catch-up frame, not one per missed deadline). At 1 frame/s telemetry spends ≤60/min of the shared 120/min quota; `OBSERVER_PUBLISH_TICK` documents the tradeoff as the knob. - **`ObserverPublishQueue` with gather-packing:** events wait as byte-accounted events (FIFO). `next_frame()` packs the front event's channel **gathered queue-wide in FIFO order** — frames never mix channels, and each channel's events keep their FIFO order, but cross-channel frame order MAY differ from arrival order. That is what keeps the drain rate in **bytes per slot** (one ~64KB frame/s) instead of front-run-length events per slot. **Null-channel events (`agent_panic`-class) are packing barriers** nothing gathers across, so causally-global events keep exact order against every channel. - **One byte cap over BOTH stores:** the event FIFO and the coalescer's pending chunk buffer count against the 4 MiB budget together; eviction is oldest-first across both (queue front, then coalescer front — structural age order) with accounting (warn + counter). A high-cardinality chunk flood is bounded exactly like a plain event flood. Coalescer entries are charged their **true** retention (`serialized_len + text.len()` — the first chunk's text lives in both the serialized skeleton and the extracted accumulator until flush). - **Shutdown is not a burst bypass:** paced one-frame-per-tick drain until empty. **Desktop** - `unwrapObserverBatch` expands envelopes on the live relay path and archive-ingest seam (round 1, unchanged). - **`activeAgentTurnsStore` watermark re-keyed per (agent, channel)** with a dedicated null-channel bucket: the per-agent `(timestamp, seq)` gate would silently skip a delayed channel's frames as stale under gather-packing's intentional cross-channel reorder. Safe because every turn-mutating path is channel-scoped by the event's own `channelId` (endTurn's null-turnId fallback matches `turn.channelId`; resurrectTurn keys on `event.channelId`), so per-channel serialization preserves each guard the per-agent gate provided. The tombstone-cap justification is rewritten for the new keying (worst case for an evicted tombstone is a ghost badge the prune reaps — bounded cosmetic staleness, not corruption). Community-switch save/restore deep-clones the nested map. Other per-agent maps stay agent-keyed: the clock offset is a running minimum (order-insensitive); turns/tombstones mutate only through channel-scoped paths. ## Version skew — old desktop + new harness Gather-packing *intentionally* emits cross-channel-reordered frames. An **old desktop** (per-agent watermark) against a **new harness** will silently skip a delayed channel's turn-state events as stale — working badges on that channel can go stale/missing until its next fresh event. Transcript and archive are unaffected (the transcript store sorts + rebuilds on out-of-order arrival; the archive is per-channel by construction). Ship desktop and harness together; skew degrades badges only, not data at rest. ## Throughput ceiling — "lossless" is qualified Sustained lossless rate is what fits in one ~64KB frame per second, now genuinely in bytes under interleaving: | event payload | events per frame | sustained ceiling | |---|---|---| | 100 B | 250 | 250 ev/s | | 500 B | 99 | 99 ev/s | | 2 KB | 30 | 30 ev/s | | 10 KB | 6 | 6 ev/s | With C channels producing concurrently, publish slots round-robin between them: per-channel drain is ~64KB/C per second and the 4 MiB burst budget (~64s single-channel) shortens accordingly. Beyond budget, oldest-first drops **with accounting** — visible, designed loss. **Accounting semantics:** `dropped_events` counts SOURCE (generated) observer events, not retained entries — evicting a coalesced entry that merged N chunks charges N. On the published side, a merged entry ships all N sources' text in ONE event, so the reconciliation invariant is `ingested == dropped_events + Σ source_events over published events` (for unmerged events, source_events = 1). ## Verification At `63d821620d3513505e8766ac691a8002f9d4a96f` (this head; `git rev-parse HEAD` matched in the same shell as every run), rustc 1.95.0: - `cargo test -p buzz-acp`: **689 lib + 9 integration, 0 failed** — regressions: interleaved 2-channel drain packs into ≤4 frames not 200 slots; null-channel barrier; queue-wide gather with within-channel FIFO; distinct-key 50KB chunk flood bounded by the cap with event-level accounting (published + dropped == ingested, survivors newest); paused-time `MissedTickBehavior::Skip` pin (verified to fail under `Burst`: 3 frames vs 1); merged-key eviction accounts every absorbed source chunk in BOTH arms — coalescer-side (Max's round-3 probe) and post-flush FIFO-side (Sami M13 / Max's round-4 probe: fails 102 vs 151 under `+= 1`). All three cap tests assert on independently walked retained bytes, not the accumulator (verified to fail without the `+text.len()` fix: 8,328,386 / 8,328,272 vs 4 MiB); the walker itself is pinned two-sided against the accumulator (all four blinding mutants M17–M20 verified to fail it, including the walker+fix cancellation pair). - `cargo clippy -p buzz-acp --all-targets -- -D warnings` clean, `cargo fmt --check` clean - Desktop: `tsc --noEmit` clean; node tests **4366 passed, 0 failed** — snapshot-clone family fully pinned: watermark aliasing (round 4), turns aliasing and tombstone aliasing (round 5, pre-existing gaps; each mutant verified to fail exactly its target test with an in-test control). Prior rounds: cross-channel reorder processed, cross-channel-delayed null-turnId `turn_error` evicts only its own channel's turn, null-bucket replay idempotency, same-channel stale/duplicate still skipped, watermark survives community-switch save/restore - All pre-push hooks green at the pushed commit (branch-skew, desktop-check, desktop-test, rust-tests, desktop-tauri-checks) Part of the rate-limiting fix stack; independent of `eva/rate-limit-fixes` by design (separate minimal PR per Tyler's ruling). --------- Signed-off-by: Eva <011987e296fd5006292d2f930b574be47c7801048d1983c46c425d3c95f0cffd@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz> Signed-off-by: Sami <f4a42a97e594b77bdbd8ee35191c8b28a94a4cb871d96f32921558275421fb68@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz> Co-authored-by: Eva <011987e296fd5006292d2f930b574be47c7801048d1983c46c425d3c95f0cffd@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz> Co-authored-by: Sami <f4a42a97e594b77bdbd8ee35191c8b28a94a4cb871d96f32921558275421fb68@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.