As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, a growing challenge for development teams has been AI-assisted division of labor. Developers often find themselves working in silos, managing conversations with AI tools that need to be hand-delivered to share progress. A new collaboration tool created by open source AI pioneer, Block called Buzz is designed to change the way humans and AI agents interact.
According to Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI Skills, Buzz was born to help streamline this disconnected workflow. The goal was to move AI collaboration from a one-person experience to a shared, transparent workspace. Buzz replaces individual team communication tools with an integrated workspace that offers Slack- and GitHub-like channels, direct messaging, voice, code and workflow.
“The idea behind it was that everyone was walking around and working with an AI tool, kind of in private, and we were spending all our time coordinating between people as they walked around and working in the silo with their AI,” Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI Capabilities, told SD Times in an interview. “We wanted a workspace, a workspace where people can come to a single service and be like many people working with many AI agents to make a kind of building products together,
Buzz traces back to Goose, an open source project Axen wrote about a year ago. While Goose focused on the low-level technology infrastructure that enabled AI to code or edit documents, Buzz represents a shift to high-level collaboration. After testing a Slack-based prototype called Builderbot earlier this year, the team realized that users wanted a model where agents could work within a shared chat, allowing everyone involved to see work as it progressed.
Providing agents with an identity
Buzz is notable for its agent identity and memory. Rather than having anonymous bots generate comments, Buzz gives each agent a unique ID. This is powered by the Buzz relay, a back-end system that manages the exchange of messages and stores memories collected during work sessions, Axen said.
“One of the things we’ve been working hard on is that the Buzz relay … saves memories, so the bots have memories that they accumulate as they work with you,” Axen said. “So you can just tell it how you want it to work with you. It can also learn our systems … And then, what we’re seeing people do is make it more valuable to grow bots into different roles. So they’ll have more than one. So I might have two or three agents that I’m working with regularly, and one of them is the one that I use to do a lot of the Q work, and the other one is A.”
This identity-driven approach also solves the lack of transparency, because in previous models, bots would appear out of context, causing confusion. With easy-to-use, in-app configuration, Buzz changes this.
“It’s not like you’re going to go into the admin panel and like to work with your IT team to create a new bot and bring it to the company,” Axen notes. “With just a few clicks in the app, you can just say, ‘Okay, I have a new bot. This bot works for me, and we have a cryptography method to show that that bot is yours in a strong way.’
It is built on the Nostr protocol
To ensure that this technology remains open and accessible, Buzz is built on the Nostr protocol, which provides individuals and agents with cryptographic key pairs ensuring that individuals and communities can use the software without any intermediate host. Buzz replaces individual team communication tools with an integrated workspace that offers Slack- and GitHub-like channels, direct messaging, voice, code and workflow.
“If we were building a tool that only Block Inc. would use, we wouldn’t really need to use a law like this,” Axen explained. “But because we’re using Nostr, that means anyone outside of Block can use this software, and people can connect to anyone’s host, and they’ll have the same identity on each system.”
What is Block’s Buzz AI workshop?
Buzz is a group workspace created by Block that allows multiple people to work alongside multiple AI agents in a shared, transparent environment. It offers Slack- and GitHub-like channels, direct messaging, voice, coding, and workflow features. Unlike traditional AI tools that function as one-on-one conversations, Buzz is designed to expose AI work in a public environment so the entire team can see progress as it progresses.
How does Buzz manage AI agent identity and memory?
Buzz gives each agent a unique identity backed by a cryptographic identity, so team members always know which agent belongs to whom. Buzz relay – the back-end system – stores memories accumulated during work sessions, allowing agents to learn user preferences and specific system context over time. Agents can be configured directly in the application without involving IT or the admin panel.
What does Block plan for Buzz’s Git and GitHub integration?
According to Block’s head of AI Capabilities Bradley Axen, the next milestone in Buzz’s development is integrating Git and code management workflows directly into the chat interface. The goal is to allow code approval, reviews, and repository updates to happen as part of Buzz’s shared workspace instead of requiring developers to switch to a separate tool like GitHub.
What protocol does Buzz use and why is it important to your posture?
Buzz is built on the Nostr protocol, which gives everyone and the AI agent a cryptographic key pair of the decentralized identity. Because Nostr is an open protocol, anyone outside the Block can run the Buzz software on their own infrastructure and maintain the same identity on different hosts. This removes the dependency on a single central host.
What is the relationship between the Buzz project and the open-source Goose of the Block?
Buzz came from Goose, an open source project written by Bradley Axen about a year ago. Goose focuses on low-tech infrastructure for AI-assisted coding and document management. Buzz builds on that foundation and shifts the focus to high-level, multi-user interactions between humans and AI agents.
