Jack Dorsey shipped something this week, and I didn't need much convincing to test it - it's open source, it's built on Nostr, and it's Jack. Buzz is Block's replacement for Slack and GitHub - a workspace where people and AI agents work side by side, everything stored as signed events on a relay, Apache 2.0 all the way down. Jack building on the protocol where Few already lives was all the invitation I needed.
Setup was the first surprise. It's genuinely easy, and when you sign up, you get a Nostr key. Signing up didn't create an account in somebody's database - it gave me a key I can carry anywhere. Anyone who's fought their way out of the fiat system knows why that detail matters, and most people won't notice it at all.
The second surprise was how smooth it is this early. Anyone who's spent time in Slack is home in about a minute - channels down the left side, an inbox of mentions, threads under every message. The difference is who's in the room. My agents sit in the sidebar with their own faces like any other colleague, and when you write something you can watch them pick it up and start working. What they hand back doesn't look like bot spam either - their research lands as clean, structured briefs with source links and repo cards, closer to a document than a chat message. Nothing about it feels like week-one software, even though it is.
So I gave it a real job. I set up three agents with three different roles - a scout that sweeps for signal, a verifier that checks claims against primary sources, and an amplifier for distribution. Then I asked them to research the very thing they live inside. The facts in this article - the license, what ships today, what's still being wired up - were dug out and sourced by agents running on buzz. The verifier even flagged the claims it couldn't verify instead of asserting them, which is more than I can say for some humans.
They found the catch too. Buzz is not decentralized yet. Every workspace runs through a single relay, and if you don't host it yourself, Block hosts it for you. That's where I am right now - my keys, their relay. Jack says it himself:
«self-sovereign: run your own relay. own your domain and your data. carry your keys anywhere.» - Jack Dorsey
We're not there yet - federation between relays is on the roadmap, git hosting is still being wired up, and mobile doesn't exist. Day-two software gets described as day-two software.
Why does this matter beyond one more work tool? Block's head of AI asked the real question:
«Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together. The question is whether that place is proprietary or open.» - Bradley Axen
Think about how Slack and GitHub actually make money - by sitting between you and your own work. The seam is the business model. But in a free market, prices fall to the marginal cost of production, and the cost of coordinating work on an open protocol is heading toward zero. Nobody has to be evil and nothing has to be destroyed. The incentives just quietly move the work to where the toll booth isn't, one team at a time, and the middle layer dissolves into protocol. The internet already did this to information, and bitcoin is doing it to money. Now someone with real weight is pointing the same process at the tools we work in - and because it's open source, whatever good comes out of it belongs to everyone at once.
Then there's the biggest part, and calle said it better than I could:
«buzz is cool if you're a normie "wow a slack alternative for agents". buzz is EXTREMELY cool if you know nostr and that it supports everything that works on nostr. there will be thousands of web apps, mobile apps, bots, dashboards, admin tools that all work with buzz because we already built all of it in the last 3 years. crazy how open protocols just compound.» - calle
He's not just talking either - the Cashu team already runs its own buzz relay. Three years of tools built for a network the mainstream kept declaring dead, and buzz walks in and inherits all of it on day one. A product starts from zero every time. A protocol never starts from zero again.
Early days, but my coworkers hold their own keys now.
What a time to be alive!