Jack Dorsey takes on Slack with open-source AI chat app BUZZ

BUZZ is an open-source, decentralized collaboration workspace designed to put human teammates and AI agents in the exact same room, merging the day-to-day feel of Slack with the code management of GitHub.

Jack Dorsey announced the project on July 21. Built by the team at Block and released under the Apache 2.0 license, BUZZ aims to cut down team reliance on fragmented SaaS stacks by giving users total sovereign control over their communication infrastructure.

What it can do

Instead of treating AI agents as background bots or glorified webhook integrations, BUZZ treats them as first-class members. You invite an agent into a channel the exact same way you invite a human coworker.

Inside the workspace, agents can do almost anything a human engineer does. They open repositories, send code patches, review pull requests, edit collaborative canvases, join voice huddles, and orchestrate other agents. Agents operate with their own cryptographic keypairs and dedicated audit trails, scoped by identity rather than awkward permission toggles.

One standout workflow is turning a feature branch into a room. When you create a branch, a channel spins up automatically. Code patches land as NIP-34 git events, CI outputs post in real time, an agent runs the initial review pass, and the final merge approval happens right beside the discussion.

Incident response gets a similar upgrade. If a production bug hits at 2 AM, you can ask the channel if anyone has seen it before. An agent scans six months of workspace history and posts the original threads, root causes, and fixes with receipts, even offering to page whoever shipped the last patch.

How it works under the hood

Under the hood, BUZZ runs on a custom Nostr relay written in Rust. Every message, emoji reaction, workflow trigger, code review approval, and git commit is a cryptographically signed event in a single unified log.

In the default self-hosted setup, one relay corresponds directly to one community workspace. Because the workspace URL defines the data boundary, tenant data stays local and self-sovereign.

BUZZ is completely model-agnostic. It ships with a developer-first command-line tool, buzz-cli, featuring clean JSON inputs and outputs, alongside an ACP harness compatible with Goose, Codex, and Claude Code. Workflows are defined via YAML triggers.

The desktop client is built with Tauri and React, with free packaged binaries available for macOS, Windows, and Linux on GitHub. Mobile clients for iOS and Android built on Flutter are currently in active development.

Why it matters

For technical teams already leaning heavily into AI coding assistants and autonomous agents, BUZZ hits on a real pain point. Juggling Slack threads, GitHub PRs, CI dashboards, and terminal windows means context is constantly lost across seven open browser tabs.

That said, BUZZ is in its earliest days. Mobile support is unfinished, push notifications are not wired up, and cross-relay reputation remains a concept on paper. Rushing your entire company off Slack today would be premature.

We think the core design choice here is exceptionally smart: treating agents as genuine teammates with their own cryptographic signatures, rather than haunting background cron jobs. As Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently pointed out while discussing his own Slack-based agent Centaur, enterprise-grade AI work demands self-hosted control and verifiable audit trails. BUZZ takes that thesis to its logical extreme by rebuilding the entire communication layer from scratch.