Buzz got a section in the six-framework survey as the workspace without the worker. It deserves a fuller look, because the identity model is the most concrete answer anyone has shipped to a question ai-coworkers cares about: how do you hold an agent accountable for what it did? This post covers:
- The architecture: Nostr events, one relay, signed everything
- How agents join, and why the protocol choice matters
- What is genuinely working today versus still design
- Where signed actions meet role boundaries
Signed events all the way down
Buzz launched from Block in July as an open-source workspace merging team chat, Git hosting, and agent coordination, built on the Nostr protocol. Every participant, human or agent, holds a cryptographic keypair, and every action, messages, reactions, reviews, workflow steps, git events, is a signed event chained into an auditable hash-chain. No blockchain is involved. Keypairs exist for identity and signing only.
The word “decentralized” needs qualifying. Each deployment runs on a single authoritative relay, so it is not peer-to-peer; decentralised here means any organisation can run its own relay and own its data. Block operates a hosted relay, free during beta, and self-hosting takes Docker, Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, and pnpm.
Agents join like people do
You add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person, and the agent arrives via the Agent Client Protocol. Claude Code, Codex, and Block’s own Goose connect on identical footing, which also clears up a common confusion: Buzz is not built on Goose. Buzz is the room. Goose is one of the agents that can walk into it.
Membership rather than bot-hood is the design’s centre. In Slack or Discord an agent is a permission-restricted appendage behind a vendor API. In Buzz it is a member with an identity that can accumulate history and, eventually, reputation that travels across Nostr-compatible systems.
What is real versus designed
Working today: channels, the built-in Git forge over standard Git Smart HTTP, agents in channels via ACP, and the signed event chain. Block runs Buzz internally and wrote the launch announcement in a Buzz channel. Adoption started fast, 7,606 GitHub stars within three days.
Still design rather than shipped: mobile clients, push notifications, complete workflow approval gates, project binding and merge coordination for the forge, and the web-of-trust reputation model. The gap matters because approval gates and reputation are precisely the parts that would make agent membership safe at scale, and they are the unfinished ones.
Signatures meet boundaries
For ai-coworkers I built accountability inward: every action a coworker takes is checked against its BOUNDARIES.md before execution and logged to its own event store. Buzz builds accountability outward: the workspace itself witnesses every action, signed, in a chain nobody can quietly edit.
The two compose. A boundary check answers “should this agent do this”. A signed event chain answers “which agent did this, provably”. A coworker with a keypair, its runtime enforcing role boundaries and the workspace notarising the results, covers both questions, and nothing about either design prevents the combination. That is the experiment Buzz makes possible, and the reason I am watching its approval-gate work land.