## Summary Buzz clients need to recover task changes after a disconnect. This adds incremental reads of changed artifacts with database modification timestamps and a 120-second overlap. Each result contains the current revision or an explicit removal. A separate read of known IDs confirms accepted edits and restores access state. Pages use a timestamp and a stable ID to handle equal timestamps. Access grants include older records. Access policy changes require discovery and revalidation of saved IDs. The reader does not load a list of all readable channels. Ordinary artifact writes update their own rows. ### Incremental reads and WebSocket Sync This HTTP protocol maintains an eventually consistent local store. It uses `artifacts.incremental` and `"artifact":"incremental"`. It does not prove a complete set at one database snapshot. Absence never proves deletion or loss of access. [WebSocket Sync](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/8522) serves a separate use case: a complete set at `EOSE`, followed by live updates. It owns `artifacts.sync`. Both protocols can coexist. The second PR to merge must reuse the shared access helper in `artifact_query.rs` when it resolves the overlapping edits. The gate is `BUZZ_ARTIFACT_INCREMENTAL_ENABLED`. Errors use the `incremental_` prefix. Unlisted open channels require membership or an explicit `#h` scope. Listing changes reset incremental progress. Incremental reads exclude TTL artifacts. Known-ID reads return `remove` for them. The `#h` scope limits candidates before pagination. Initial reads omit deleted heads. Later reads retain deletion removals. ### Why the new timestamps are needed `created_at` comes from the event signer. `received_at` records event arrival. Neither advances when access changes or an event is redacted. Sync needs database timestamps for those changes: | Column | Why sync needs it | | --- | --- | | `artifact_heads.modified_at` | Finds current records that change through an edit, deletion, or redaction. | | `artifact_revisions.modified_at` | Dates retained move records. This lets sync remove a task from its former channel when the reader cannot access its new channel. | | `channel_members.sync_modified_at` | Finds grants, rejoins, and removals. A grant must include older tasks whose own timestamps do not change. | | `communities.artifact_policy_modified_at` | Requests recovery after a relevant channel visibility, TTL, or deletion change. Clients revalidate saved IDs. Ordinary task writes do not update it. | The database sets these timestamps with `clock_timestamp()`. The 120-second overlap covers the accepted delay between timestamp assignment and commit visibility. `BUZZ_ARTIFACT_INCREMENTAL_ENABLED` defaults to off. Apply migrations `0076`–`0078` and upgrade all writers before enablement. The 120-second delay bound is an operating assumption. [Deployment steps](https://github.com/block/buzz/blob/drouleau/artifact-snapshots/docs/artifact-sync-deployment.md) cover index prebuilds and rollback. ### Related issue No duplicate found. Related work: [read permissions](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/8338), [statement limits](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/8461), and [atomic channel settings](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/8516). ### Testing Signed HTTP E2E passes on `f3d6ac852e7ce4e2cc53bd891cef87832a868d72` after CI passes. It includes main through `ef4130da4`. A standalone local relay uses a fresh PostgreSQL 17 database, Redis, and signed NIP-98 HTTP requests. All 78 migrations apply through relay startup. All behavioral writes and reads use HTTP. The tests cover create, edit, delta reads, known-ID recovery, private moves, access grants, removals, rejoins, visibility resets, redaction, and deletion. Unlisted tests cover hidden broad discovery, named scope, known-ID reads, member access, and policy resets. They also cover bootstrap across two pages, overlap replay, and 101 move removals across pages. Decoded cursors contain no private revision IDs. With the incremental gate off, `artifacts.incremental` is absent and a signed incremental request returns `503 incremental_unavailable`. Unsigned requests are rejected. Signed tests also cover TTL exclusion, current-ID removals for TTL artifacts, moves into TTL channels, deleted initial heads, and scoped pages with exactly 100 and 3 upserts. A separate local scale test on `babcdb766` reads 10,050 tasks across 60,002 memberships. It uses seeded fixtures and a second relay state with the same signing key. The initial read takes 8.31 seconds over 101 pages with 4,923-byte events. A read with no changes takes 5.70 milliseconds. The candidate keeps the same database query. These are local measurements, not production limits. Cold pages repeat candidate scans and access checks. Writer load needs validation before fleet enablement. ```sh cargo test -p buzz-relay sync_downloads_ten_thousand_tasks_with_sixty_thousand_memberships -- --ignored --nocapture ``` The behavioral run uses `cargo build -p buzz-relay --bin buzz-relay`, then `cargo run -p buzz-relay --example artifact_incremental_final_oct30_f3`. The temporary harness drives the built relay and is removed after the run. The worktree is clean at the tested SHA. It does not exercise a native client. Git and S3 behavior are outside this validation. The [protocol](https://github.com/block/buzz/blob/drouleau/artifact-snapshots/docs/nips/NIP-AR.md#incremental-reads) defines progress, removals, limits, and recovery. Relay verification covers the signed HTTP path. Native client verification belongs to [the client PR](https://github.com/block/buzz-app/pull/1507). Generated with Codex --------- Signed-off-by: Daniel Rouleau <drouleau@squareup.com>
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
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.



