Block Launches Open Source Buzz for Human-Agent Teamwork

Jack Dorsey is back with another app. On July 21, he announced the launch of Buzz, a free workplace chat tool where AI agents get their own logins and work alongside people. It looks a lot like Slack, with some GitHub features bolted on. The main difference is Buzz is open source and self-hosted.

The product is being released under the Block umbrella, the first workplace product among a sea of financial services apps. In the blog post introducing the app, the company framed Buzz as the agent and human collaboration tool the company wanted but couldn't find. Slack already does this — Salesforce added agents with their own identities in 2024. What Block wanted was an open-source version.

Buzz gives each agent its own identity and set of permissions. It combines the channels, DMs, voice and workflow automations of Slack with GitHub-style code repositories. Block hasn't published a roadmap for future updates, instead Dorsey invited people to "build with us."

Buzz runs on Nostr, short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. It's a decentralized messaging protocol billed as an antidote to perceived censorship on social platforms, which Dorsey has funded for years. Instead of a central server, messages pass through independent relays. Users are identified by cryptographic keys rather than usernames tied to a company. If you lose the key, you lose access to the account — there's no password reset. The benefit of the approach is, in theory, any agent built on the platform could move to a Nostr-compatible platform with its history intact.

Soon after the announcement, users started reporting issues with Microsoft, OpenAI's Codex and Cloudflare blocking the app as malware. Dorsey, in response to a comment about the complexity of the UI and setup said, "we decided to ship now and fix onboarding as we learn more."

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