Kalvin C 5a349db91c feat(relay): add opt-in newest-first thread windows (#7823)
## Summary

Add an opt-in, newest-first thread window to the authenticated HTTP
query path.

A filter with `thread_window: true` returns:

- reply rows ordered by `(created_at DESC, id ASC)` with an exact
composite cursor;
- optional bounded reactions, edits, deletions, and delete-of-aux
closure;
- one relay-signed `kind:39007` bounds event bound to the normalized
host, authenticated reader, channel, root, request cursor, kinds, depth,
limit, and aux choice.

Filters without the flag keep the existing oldest-first thread behavior.
Channel windows and `kind:39006` are unchanged. No client opts into this
mode in this PR.

### Why extend NIP-CW

NIP-CW already defines relay-computed, cursor-paged conversation views
over extended NIP-01 filters. Thread windows use the same protocol
ideas: ordinary signed rows, composite keyset pagination, optional aux
closure, and relay-signed bounds. Adding a thread mode keeps those
related wire contracts together instead of creating a second NIP with
duplicated terminology and compatibility rules.

Extending a draft, optional NIP with an additive mode is normal protocol
evolution. Existing fields and meanings are not reinterpreted:

- `top_level: true` remains channel mode;
- `kind:39006` remains channel-window bounds;
- `thread_window: true` selects the new mode;
- `kind:39007` has a distinct identity and root/request binding;
- extension-unaware clients never send the selector;
- legacy thread queries remain unchanged.

NIP-CW documents only the wire contract and relay semantics. Database
plans, replica internals, and rollout procedures remain implementation
concerns.

### Why thread windows use independent modules

The implementation deliberately keeps `thread_window.rs` separate in
`buzz-core`, `buzz-db`, and `buzz-relay` rather than adding branches
throughout the existing channel-window path.

The modes share pagination concepts, but their invariants differ:

- channel mode selects top-level rows; thread mode requires one root and
depths `1..=depth_limit`;
- thread mode accepts only conversation row kinds and rejects
unknown/conflicting fields;
- thread bounds bind the root and authenticated reader because
cross-channel aux visibility can differ by reader;
- thread aux includes the root and requires complete two-hop closure;
- thread mode refreshes writer authorization before selection and before
signing;
- historical cursor pages may use a proved replica transaction, but
fallback must restart both aux hops on the writer;
- legacy thread traversal is oldest-first and must not inherit
descending cursor semantics.

Forcing these rules into channel-window code would create a mode flag
across parsing, SQL predicates, bounds construction, authorization,
replica fallback, and tests. That abstraction would not remove
complexity. It would distribute it. Separate modules keep each contract
local and leave the established channel and legacy paths untouched.

### Technical design

- Strict request parsing normalizes UUIDs, event IDs, kinds, defaults,
and cursors before computing the response binding.
- SQL applies community, root, channel, depth, kind, deletion, and
cursor predicates before `limit + 1`.
- Ordered metadata scanning plus exact event-key lookup avoids the
stale-statistics plan that previously exceeded the four-second SQL
budget on a 10k-reply thread.
- Aux work is bounded by target batches, query count, raw candidate
count, response bytes, SQL timeouts, and one shared HTTP deadline.
- Fresh authorization-set comparison catches both grants and revocations
during closure. The relay returns retryable `503` rather than signing an
incomplete page.
- Replica failure permanently degrades the request to the writer and
restarts closure from its original targets without resetting budgets.
- Migration `0049_thread_window_index.sql` adds the mixed-direction
index used by newest-first scans. It validates a prebuilt index and
bounds startup lock/build time.

### Tradeoffs

- The stale-statistics-safe plan is intentionally less clever. Measured
warm 100k deep-cursor execution increased from roughly 0.30 ms to 4.80
ms, plus about 8 ms planning, in exchange for avoiding a reproduced
multi-second timeout after rapid 10k-thread insertion.
- Bounds are authoritative only for the served page. There is no
cross-page snapshot guarantee, and replica insertion coverage does not
imply latest edit/deletion/aux visibility.
- Strict parsing rejects unsupported constraints instead of silently
serving a different row set.
- Required aux closure fails closed. The relay does not omit aux and
sign plausible-but-incomplete bounds.
- This PR ships relay capability only. Client rendering, retry UX,
live-history overlap, and compatibility fallback remain separate work.

### Related issue

No existing issue found. This work follows the thread-loading design and
review discussion.

### Testing

- `cargo test -p buzz-core`: 258 unit tests and 2 doctests passed.
- `cargo check --workspace --all-targets`: passed at the rebased
implementation head.
- `cargo test -p buzz-db`: 131 non-PostgreSQL tests passed; 275
infrastructure tests were ignored as declared.
- Focused PostgreSQL migration/runtime regressions: 3/3 passed against
an isolated PostgreSQL container, including both corrected
migration-ledger tests.
- `cargo fmt --all --check`: passed.
- Pre-rebase feature validation passed 398/398 PostgreSQL tests,
signed-wire multi-tenant/auth/pagination/aux/revocation probes, clean
Compose boot/reboot, and full core tests.
- Independent HA validation exercised three relay pods and a physical
PostgreSQL standby on the same runtime logic before the final
documentation-only cleanup.
- Independent final-delta review confirmed exactly two changed files,
byte-identical executable migration SQL after comments/diagnostic
normalization, matching prebuild/catalog/recovery instructions, and `git
diff --check`; no runtime receipts were relabeled to the new SHA.
- The pre-push hook ran repository checks but its Rust unit lane exited
100 without exposing an individual failed test in the captured
multiplexed output. The independently run affected-package checks above
passed; current-head repository CI remains required.

Known unrelated baseline behavior remains: the mesh-demo echo test can
return 504, and same-second archive → unarchive can deduplicate its
membership notification. Neither path is changed here.

---------

Signed-off-by: Kalvin Chau <kalvin@block.xyz>
Signed-off-by: cid <d9f92a72922bf45c17379a47d64dae84b6020397c2d5a52b5317d512068cd9d3@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Signed-off-by: am <6e30cd56c30e030cd31bb0939b94a7c257c9a09d5ba2d92cf2735da45629f248@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: cid <d9f92a72922bf45c17379a47d64dae84b6020397c2d5a52b5317d512068cd9d3@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: am <6e30cd56c30e030cd31bb0939b94a7c257c9a09d5ba2d92cf2735da45629f248@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
2026-09-23 12:01:45 -07:00
2026-09-18 19:17:10 +00:00
2026-03-06 21:00:58 +00:00
2026-06-10 21:07:02 +00:00
2026-07-27 14:18:24 -04:00
2026-09-18 19:17:10 +00:00

Buzz 🐝

A workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.

Vision · Sovereign · Forge · Agents · Architecture · Releasing · Apache 2.0

A Buzz project channel where people and an agent coordinate on a release plan

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

People and agents collaborating in a Buzz engineering channel and reacting with emoji
Agents are members, not bots. Add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person.
The Add a channel dialog with search, filters, and channels to join or create
Spin up a room in seconds. Name it, describe it, make it private.
A video playing in Buzz with frame-anchored comments in a side panel
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:

Deploy on Railway

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

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.

Description
Pull mirror of block/buzz (Apache-2.0): the Nostr workspace behind buzz.hal8.odyssey-works.io
Readme Apache-2.0 1.9 GiB
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