Having agents see everything you and your colleagues see is cool.
The challenge comes when you want to make certain things private to certain people. In that world you don’t want multiplayer agents leaking data, so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.
Single-player agents, on the other hand, are much more straightforward — they act on a single user’s behalf, and then the challenge is ensuring the single-player agent cannot exfiltrate private data into a shared space unless the user specifically permits it.
Because there’s an unlimited number of groups with different combinations of memberships. If I am in group A but not group B and an agent is in both, what is it allowed to share with me?
I'd like to see this problem solved in such a way that your group memberships are transitively applied to your access to agents. In other words: you shouldn’t be allowed to talk to an agent at all if, at a given point in time, that agent is or was in a group that you are not or were not in at that time. Does that make sense? I don’t know how practical this restriction is, but letting the AI manage such permissions on its own seems reckless to me.
These kinds of rules never survive real world tests. For example if I create a private group just for myself and auto invite every agent in the company into it, does that mean no one can now use any of them?
The product seems to use the same 'scoping' mechanism that humans would use, so you can give agents access to whatever 'channels' you want.
The issue seems to be that they 'invented' an auth and permission protocol instead of delegating to something existing, it would be as if they thought their idea of permissions were novel.
I agree with what you are saying but this is not how we solved the issue with who can access what.
In our cloud harness we have the notion of shared and private secrets. When something is authenticated with a shared secret it is basically something that can be used in a public setting. If something is private then it can be only accessed via trusted channel. It works for slack, telegram, etc.
In fact, our slack agents are very strong this department and it is guaranteed there is zero leak of private information.
No channel will disclose private information. The only way to get that to work is to DM the agent directly or to use slash commands which are ephemeral / private.
Hang on a second. You think accessing private information in a public channel is a good idea?
If a tool is authenticated as personal then it can be only accessed under personal context - i.e. privately. Now if the author of the agent wants to add tools authenticated with shared secrets that is something should be considered in the threat model.
In other words:
- reading my personal emails in a public setting - not ok
- reading the agents shared inbox in a public setting - probably ok depending on the threat model
I have lived in organizations where under 1% of messages were made on public channels. The experience of finding information in slack, or even knowing if there's a private channel where all of this is discussed, but where nobody invited you to, is not one I wish on anyone.
all ingested data and all derivations of that data can link to source channel and associated ACL that syncs with the source. then search/reads/etc just join on and respect the ACL. not that complicated to manage for things like slack, meetings, etc.
Private groups are the worst thing in a truly collaborative environment. Would be nice in Slack to have a Publish this whole freaking thread to a public channel button.
Maybe this is naive or startup-brained of me: I understand not wanting HR-related things to be potentially exposed by a misaligned agent, but when it comes purely to the building of software I personally do not care at all who can read the code/discussions & engage with the process.
> Buzz is an open-source, self-hosted workspace that combines team chat, AI agents and Git hosting using signed Nostr events, so teams can keep control of their data.
It’s kinda interesting seeing what, IIRC, was originally a subreddit name which spawned from an AskReddit thread, is now a common marketing phrase in the tech world.
Similar to the sub itself, it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”
I imagine a lot of people in the industry also fondly remember the 2010s reddit experience.
In this article, it's just an AI-generated TL;DR, tagline, sub-title box that was badly prompt-engineered and the website owners didn't care about its quality. I am pretty sure the entire website is an AI generated news aggregator.
Not sure how long the subreddit has existed but I always assumed it was inspired by the episode of The Office where Michael asks Oscar to explain what a surplus is like he's 5. The broader usage on social media and the ELI5 shorthand are definitely the result of the subreddit though.
This article is definitely abusing the terminology, because I wouldn't expect even tech-knowledgeable people to know what Nostr is or does.
That screenshot is some Lynchian horror. "#engineering. New direction, team – we're moving the prototype to Flutter" and then the humans and agent bots engage in flirty emoji-filled chats with cutesy names "I nailed the physics, UI shell @Honeybot?"
I'm trying to imagine a world in which this makes sense as a way to organize software development work, but coming up short. It's on a blockchain or something though, so there ya go.
It doesn't. But as long as it's a vibe-coded slop product shat out by one of the tech glitterati using the latest marketing wanketeering and sucking up tokens to power the in-built AI nonsense, it'll be eaten up.
Yeah just need to tell the system prompt to not do that. A grumpy senior engineer agent that pushes back on constant tech stack changes would be good too.
I love that we're challenging the status quo in chat. It feels like we've settled into an eternal September of sorts. I am somewhat bearish that Slack and Teams will survive, or rise to, the agent era.
That said, I'm curious whether NOSTR is really the protocol for this. For some really large corporations you're looking at a lot of clients (and their shadows like cellphones, local agents etc) as well as a lot of (likely) team-based agents.
The identity architecture makes sense for centrally hosted agents. Users also probably have their own personal agents as well. Do those just reuse user credentials or are they differentiated in some way? I couldn't tell.
I also am curious whether git really needs to be a dependency here. Like, maybe for Block it does, but it introduces a lot of complexity that I feel could be exported to merging VCS Host events to the Buzz event log.
I'm also curious what challenges will arise as new capabilities emerge. For instance, both Sol and Claude can now render native components in my chat window which is a massive leg up in terms of firming up a design change.
Rust is also a choice. I'm curious what alternatives the team considered and how they landed on Rust.
Shared information like code and files are increasingly important for keeping people and agents aligned, and "AI Native" businesses will become even more code heavy, so that makes sense.
Why does Rust feel like a bad choice to you? In my experience shipping med device software, it's great for keeping the code that teams write cohesive and correct
Now when I see new software projects I just think of how much of them are made with agents and the unreliability/easy abandonment that comes with it. Ten years ago this product would have been of a known quality. Not saying anything about buzz specifically.
I find this thought process somewhat faulty given that the vast majority of software ends up in that spot regardless.
Hard to take this as that big a deal when Google literally launched a product along similar social themes named "Google Buzz" which lasted all of like 16 months in 2010, well before agents and llms.
Either the project will find a fit, or it won't - and code quality doesn't have all that much to do with it existing in 2 years (some - but not as much as engineers want to believe).
Yeah, it used to be the friction of making something was at least a partial sign that it had been thought out to some degree. Now it's just "lets lob it on users and make them figure out if this is worth a damn". I feel like with a lot of this stuff, there isn't much value to being an early adopter and there's a lot of risk. Better just to wait a couple months to see how things shake out. If it has staying power it really won't matter if you're behind by like a few months.
Nah. I made plenty of software and then abandoned them because I lost interest in them. My GitHub is already a fairly large collection of my own abandoned software, and there are 10x more on my PC that I never bothered to upload to GitHub.
As a small startup I'd love to ditch Slack, as its a walled garden and both under-featured and over-complicated at the same time. GitHub has been losing my favor too.
Tangentially our startups is combining email, AI agents (chat and coding), and GitHub workflows and it feels really good.
Bots in team chat is not a bad idea. I've been experimenting with that for a few months.
We started with Slack. This kind of works but dialing in the gazillion of permissions needed to end up with something that works is a bit painful. And you have to do this over and over again for each new bot.
So, we started experimenting with self hosted alternatives. First we tried Matrix. It's nice but a bit too strict on end to end encryption which gets in the way if you actually want to share information with bots. So, a few weeks ago we switched to Zulip. That's pretty straightforward to setup as well. It's very easy to create bot users with both and create some automations. We did some with Openclaw and I ended up replacing those with something coded around the haystack framework, which is a bit less of a messy basket case than Openclaw.
And as I discovered after I installed it, the Zulip leadership actually just got hired by Anthropic. It seems Jack Dorsey beat them to market making some announcements but I imagine that Anthropic might have very similar plans.
IMHO team level use cases for agents actually make a lot of sense. Companies are run by groups of people and the larger those groups the more team overhead you get. Perfect for optimizing with AI. And if you have people doing a lot of stuff with AI, that only adds to the need for them to communicate what they are doing and coordinating with others. Doing that out in the open in some shared channel makes a lot of sense. And having some shared team guard rails also makes sense. And if you think about more complex processes with handoffs between people (and possibly some agents), a team chat is a good place to do those as well.
I feel like this might be solving a real problem (agents having identity, access controls, etc that are provisioned like you would a regular user) — with this Nostr layer that doesn’t really provide any specific value that I can see. So actions are signed, great — this is like telling me I’m going to be using blockchain to store my files because I need crypto on top of my crypto. We see where that ended up. Is Nostr doing anything here that is actually a value add, vs a processing tax that could be done more efficiently with a shared service?
I had the same thought - but maybe it's good? I was thinking that if you have a decentralized store than you can connect to it regardless of dev environment. I've used XMPP for orchestration but I can see ergonomic advantages to this.
Nostr gives you and your agents a durable, portable identity across communities/relays/workspaces.
You can also independently verify that the messages you're reading came from the person/agent who sent them, even if the server/relay operator is broken or trying to trick you.
This can be important in environments that live outside of enterprise auth walled gardens.
Slack exists largely because IRC was insufficient. It didn't natively support channel history, search, etc.
For AI agents to flourish, Slack has to either truly open its network with a protocol or eventually be replaced.
I'd like to see Slack embrace an AT protocol-based chat system, which then apps like Buzz could implement. Then users could log in with domain handles like @yourname.com, and agents could use handles like @agent1.yourname.com, all under their complete control.
Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?
I ask about Slack here because it's pertinent, but I've both seen and experienced firsthand this inversion across the industry where we must adapt our workflows for AI.
Isn't a tool supposed to work for you, not the other around?
You're assuming there is a bag to capture about placating to slop bots, that has yet to be determine. What it mostly seems to do now is balloon your services capacity on serving your worst customers to do busy work no one cares about.
There's many new and existing companies right now that are growing fast based on the promise of doing "x but with AI". This starts from customer support tools, coding agents, code review platforms and they are definitely "capturing a bag" there.
I'm not blind to the issues with AI, but Slack ignoring it (Apart from their enterprise AI search they are pushing) and having the bots interact on the platform right now (Basically spewing a lot of messages in threads with all their "thinking" and not a more native integration) is not going to help them.
There basically haven't been any new features on their bot / app platform for a long time now.
Slack isn't responsible for the work product of its customers. They provide a service, and like to get new customers. Those customers use agents. Which tech solution they use is debatable but they can't ignore it. They have supported bots and 3rd parties for eons anyway.
> Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?
Technically, because if the world moves to AI-driven tools and Slack is not cooperating, it will no longer serve the world and will be left behind.
> Isn't a tool supposed to work for you
If you want AI integration in your chat and Slack is not helping make it happen, then Slack is not working for you.
On the other hand, constantly chasing the latest fad can be a useless drain of resources and (worse yet) attention. In this context, AI is by now most likely not a fad, but the ways to interoperate with it can be: mcp, cli, agent, tag, ... And the same goes for users, reinventing their processes and practices 5 times per year.
I think this is missing my implied point. Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people? Or is it a handful of decision makers who aren't thinking about the technology critically for one reason or another (either due to lack of information/understanding, or a financial stake)?
AI is still seen very negatively in opinion polls across multiple countries, and anecdotally, tools which were often obnoxious to use before AI are now much more so, at least to my flesh-and-blood self. It really seems like we're making things worse for ourselves just to help support this would-be self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just my two-cents as a very much boots-on-the-ground infrastructure engineer. We use LLMs heavily on my team -- to write code and review PRs. Our harnesses and guardrails are very very good so we get extremely high-quality output out of most models.
But getting the humans and agents to talk together is really fragmented right now. It's annoying that the agent with the context in my locally-installed Cursor can't really participate in a Slack conversation about a PR that 'it' principally authored (and which I've signed off on).
This is a real communication problem that we face every day, and eventually someone will solve it well and I will ask our leadership to give them a lot of money.
> Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people?
Ahhh I see. That's going to change a lot across companies, teams and individuals. My particular bubble is full of actual workers looking for ways to apply it and trying things to see what sticks, so that interpretation did not land in my head. If anything, decision makers around me are being encouraging, but cautious and throttling experiments and requests for access/connection/etc, and damn well they should because they are actually accountable for mishaps.
I'm sympathetic to this POV. I think specifically in the case of Slack, it's not their responsibility in a cosmic sense, but it is in line with the direction and general promise they've been making to customers since forever.
A major part of Slack's go-to-market strategy for as long as I can remember has been pushing Slack as more than a interface for talking with teammates, but as a unified interface for generally piloting your business. Slack has heavily pushed ideas like "SlackOps", they've had Slackbot in the product forever, and they've always prioritized and sold integrations designed to let you build your business workflows in Slack. They even updated Slackbot to go from "that chatbot you DM to set reminders" to "Your AI teammate in Slack": https://slack.com/features/slackbot
So adapting to agents is in keeping with what Slack promises its users. I know that a lot of people don't want more AI features in apps that don't need them (i fall into this camp despite working in ML myself and using LLMs all day). I just think that in the case of Slack, their most passionate power-users are also the sort of people who do really want AI features.
Notion is probably a good companion here. It is similarly a really primitive utility--text editing--that has marketed itself as a sort of central interface for running your company. I know plenty of people, especially outside of engineering, for whom Notion is essentially their browser for work. And it's probably not a coincidence that the Notion + Slack are the two normal office software companies I can think of who've most heavily adopted and marketed AI features.
It is like asking in 1999 why DHL should have a website. Surely they can just meet people where they are - on the phone, on the high street. Why does everything need a bloody website.
ATProto's tbd permission system is insufficient for the granularity needed in enterprise. Many of those features needed (like groups) will have to be built in an app view and by proxy be centralized. ACLs are two generations in the past of IAM history
Chat is also not a great modality for the PDS/ATP, Roomy learned this and is building a dedicated protocol and bridge.
I know about it, that's the one I'm referring to. That proposal is insufficient. I was deeply involved in the private data discussions, built a PDS fork / prototype on ReBAC/SpiceDB, and presented it at the first Private Data WG (which no one from Bluesky attended). Bluesky has chosen a path that suits them, not the community at large.
At this point, Bluesky controls the protocol, decided what they want permissioned spaces to look like, and are not entertaining any other proposals (afaict).
I expect there to be an eventual successor that puts permissions at the core of the protocol from the very start.
I originally was passionate about Slack simply because it was "IRC but with modern quality of life improvements". Ever since they got fucked by MSFT and sold out to Salesforce, it's basically been dead in the water and the only changes have largely made it worse.
I've recently built some project that also supports Nostr (https://getbirdfeeder.com, but more for the fun of playing with Nostr) but it feels very forced to use it for something like that. It feels like it's solving an issue that no team chat ever has.
> Buzz is built around a self-hostable Nostr relay. Every message, reaction, workflow step, code event and approval is stored as a cryptographically signed event. Human employees and agents receive the same basic identity structure, including their own key pairs, channel memberships and audit trails.
I think a tool with this kind of UX is the future of engineering orgs. It reminds me a lot of JetBrains Space (which I already thought was a good idea back then), but with agents.
I don't see a lot of information about the Git hosting aspect of the product on the website, though. Somewhat doubtful that they will be able to make a Git forge with similar polish to GitLab
It subjectively seems to me that integrating with an existing forge (e.g. Forgejo) on the API layer and rebuilding the auth and frontend is a better bet. You get stable features like PRs, permissions and CI actions out of the box and they stay synced with known formats in the community and so make your tool easy to adopt. Though making a forge from scratch does have advantages especially for internal company use cases.
Another problem I see with Buzz is that the tool doesn't seem to be taking advantage of its vertical integration inside its UX enough. There is a lot more you can do with full control over Git hosting, project context, and org-wide chat in a single tool than what this tool attempts to do right now.
I was trying to build something like that myself, but I had based it off IRC and was going to go protocol first not PaaS type of thing.
I think this is an unclaimed space where the future of work is bound to find itself in, though I'm not yet sure how/who is gonna win.
My solo project was abandoned unfortunately, that said I saw some cool protocol initiatives similar to it recently like this one: https://github.com/h5i-dev/h5i
No one is going to churn Slack for this just because it is "Agent First". Slack is more than good enough to tag Agents and will fill in the missing pieces slowly
Slack's approach is NOT good enough, because the version of the Agent that lives in Slack cannot see the context of the Agent that lives inside Cursor on my developer laptop. They might be clones with identical brains, but they can't talk to each other or compare notes.
So why can't the cursor instance on your laptop have a slack bot? I've had a slack bot on my build machine written in chicken-scheme of all things for years, I feel like the great people (or clankers?) at cursor ought to be able to figure this one out
The name is probably not the best fit but if we can get a good solution that's not horrible that's easy to self host I and open-source I am fine with it.
Though I fear this might not be well maintained or have a good foundation being so heavily agent focused but I will out of sheer ambition of a more open stack support anything that help make it a possibility.
Too much talk about LLMs and too little about the self-hosting part of this project. Self-hosted stuff looks appealing to me. We dropped Slack as an option in the past because we couldn't self-host it.
Interesting idea. I think the "multiplayer mode for AI development" bit resonates somewhat. Biggest problem is that I do think most companies have a ton of key contributors that find git/code intimidating, so part of me thinks the real answer here will be stuff like Surfboard, Town, etc. that can work with git AND the work tools in a more user friendly, browser-first way.
Kind of amazing that given the state of the world money is still focused on remixes of different forms of social engagement. Is this because it's an obvious place to display ads? Or is it something else?
I'd like to think if I were JD that I would be focusing on something a bit more tangible for the world. A more useful aspect of tech to emerge or be invested in.
But, apparently AI agents in chat that sit adjacent to code is The Next Big Thing?
Are you implying that a tech billionaire, who moved to a private South American compound, who looks like a man that microdoses ayahuasca daily, might just a rich kid tinkering to stay relevant without the incentive or context to actually BE relevant anymore?
yeah, but the reality is that every chat room bot integration is half-assed, and the good integrations force you to use chat rooms/services that are either a nuissance to spin up and join, heavily opinionated, or lack features, or even the most basic security and privacy stances.
there's definitely room for someone to do it right.
I always chuckle when someone makes a GitHub alternative, and the code is hosted on GitHub. Kind of shows that replacing GitHub isn't just about replacing the code.
No other company in the internet age has done what Facebook has. Zuckerberg -
Copies every product he sees. Copied Twitter, Snapchat. Lifted features from Google+
Overwrite people's public-facing emails, which hurts being able to use competitive services https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Apparently wrote some tool which allowed for data transfer into FB from Myspace, but not the other way around (yes, I know. In many ways Myspace was hot trash, that doesn't mean he wasn't a malicious actor to extreme extents
Blocked links to competition
Other things I can't remember right now
Say what you will about Myspace, or Friendster, or Google+ (I'm annoyed as anyone they thought a great method to get people to use it was "ok, we'll ask you again later" on Youtube) but Facebook has always rigged the game, they've been bad actors
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
The fact that he does that instead of focusing on what he is already in charge of is egregious. If I was a Block shareholder looking at this, I’d be upset. It’s been years of him going on side quests like Tidal, blockchain, weekly etc. while ignoring the core needs of his customers and losing out on various fronts. Toast is a $20B company while Block is some $50B company after the acquisition of cash app (which by the way is a different conversation altogether) when Square should’ve had almost 90% market share is shameful.
The dude is clueless at the wheel and somehow people still keep giving him grace, when really he did a few things more than a decade ago and since then has mostly just fumbled around.
Hey I was prototyping this exact kind of thing, there's something to be said for releasing early.
The project fell to the back burner because I had VM ambitions and just didn't have enough disk space on my macbook to do VMs well. 512 GB and always full
I know that he referred to Twitter as "it's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in"
Yes Zuck because a product that didn't constantly fuck around with people's privacy settings and had real real-world uses... sure, money is all that matters. You would know. Your vision of the web isn't liberation, it's "dumb fucks", that's all you think people are
I'm old enough to remember when Twitter was a developer centric platform and were emphatically asking developers to use the API tk create products and help spread it. I then remember them rug pulling those APIs and screwing the devs because it interfered with them shuffling the feed and displaying ads and promoted tweets. That was well before Musk and I refuse to see Jack Dorsey as the good guy of tech he seems desperate to present himself as. Especially after he pretended AI was the reason for laying off half of the Block staff
[I work for Slack, opinions very much my own]
Having agents see everything you and your colleagues see is cool.
The challenge comes when you want to make certain things private to certain people. In that world you don’t want multiplayer agents leaking data, so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.
Single-player agents, on the other hand, are much more straightforward — they act on a single user’s behalf, and then the challenge is ensuring the single-player agent cannot exfiltrate private data into a shared space unless the user specifically permits it.
> so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to.
Why wouldn't you simply use the group chat ID (+more) to key the conversations on?
Because there’s an unlimited number of groups with different combinations of memberships. If I am in group A but not group B and an agent is in both, what is it allowed to share with me?
I'd like to see this problem solved in such a way that your group memberships are transitively applied to your access to agents. In other words: you shouldn’t be allowed to talk to an agent at all if, at a given point in time, that agent is or was in a group that you are not or were not in at that time. Does that make sense? I don’t know how practical this restriction is, but letting the AI manage such permissions on its own seems reckless to me.
These kinds of rules never survive real world tests. For example if I create a private group just for myself and auto invite every agent in the company into it, does that mean no one can now use any of them?
Seems easy for Buzz to solve. I’m just happy to have an alternative to Slack.
The product seems to use the same 'scoping' mechanism that humans would use, so you can give agents access to whatever 'channels' you want.
The issue seems to be that they 'invented' an auth and permission protocol instead of delegating to something existing, it would be as if they thought their idea of permissions were novel.
I agree with what you are saying but this is not how we solved the issue with who can access what.
In our cloud harness we have the notion of shared and private secrets. When something is authenticated with a shared secret it is basically something that can be used in a public setting. If something is private then it can be only accessed via trusted channel. It works for slack, telegram, etc.
In fact, our slack agents are very strong this department and it is guaranteed there is zero leak of private information.
And if someone gets access to a channel that they shouldn't?
The best norms around slack channels is to have most channels be public, but have norms where not everyone is in every channel.
No channel will disclose private information. The only way to get that to work is to DM the agent directly or to use slash commands which are ephemeral / private.
so your agents can't access any private information in public channels?
Not very useful.
Still probably better than Claude's new bot which requires a service account per channel!
Hang on a second. You think accessing private information in a public channel is a good idea?
If a tool is authenticated as personal then it can be only accessed under personal context - i.e. privately. Now if the author of the agent wants to add tools authenticated with shared secrets that is something should be considered in the threat model.
In other words:
- reading my personal emails in a public setting - not ok - reading the agents shared inbox in a public setting - probably ok depending on the threat model
I have lived in organizations where under 1% of messages were made on public channels. The experience of finding information in slack, or even knowing if there's a private channel where all of this is discussed, but where nobody invited you to, is not one I wish on anyone.
all ingested data and all derivations of that data can link to source channel and associated ACL that syncs with the source. then search/reads/etc just join on and respect the ACL. not that complicated to manage for things like slack, meetings, etc.
Private groups are the worst thing in a truly collaborative environment. Would be nice in Slack to have a Publish this whole freaking thread to a public channel button.
But who is allowed to press it? If anyone, then anyone can expose career ruining messages from someone else, even inadvertently.
Can’t anyone already do that with a screenshot or a log dump? I’m always assuming company provided comms platforms are fully readable by the admins
Maybe this is naive or startup-brained of me: I understand not wanting HR-related things to be potentially exposed by a misaligned agent, but when it comes purely to the building of software I personally do not care at all who can read the code/discussions & engage with the process.
My understanding of what they were saying Buzz is is that agents are "1st class" users in their own right, rather than being an app integration.
If you have a user called Claude, then you just apply ACL as normal & you don't care if they're human or bot, right?
> Explain Like I'm 5
> Buzz is an open-source, self-hosted workspace that combines team chat, AI agents and Git hosting using signed Nostr events, so teams can keep control of their data.
Very different expectations of 5-year-olds.
Hah, I used to tell my agents “eli5 (this task)”, then I started to worry that it will actually explain things as you would to a 5yo…
It’s just an irrational fear I have, in the end agents are not the HN comment section and they usually understand what I actually mean.
I imagine that's all very understandable to the average Bay Area five-year-old.
The goal is to replace these 5 year old with a team of Nostr aware agents. /s
It’s kinda interesting seeing what, IIRC, was originally a subreddit name which spawned from an AskReddit thread, is now a common marketing phrase in the tech world.
Similar to the sub itself, it’s now just shorthand for “describe using the first principles the expected audience should understand.”
I imagine a lot of people in the industry also fondly remember the 2010s reddit experience.
In this article, it's just an AI-generated TL;DR, tagline, sub-title box that was badly prompt-engineered and the website owners didn't care about its quality. I am pretty sure the entire website is an AI generated news aggregator.
The phrase was in an episode of The Office prior to that. I think it's fairly old.
Are you smarter than a five year old, kinda show
I remember someone saying it in high school back in the late 90s or early 00s.
Not sure how long the subreddit has existed but I always assumed it was inspired by the episode of The Office where Michael asks Oscar to explain what a surplus is like he's 5. The broader usage on social media and the ELI5 shorthand are definitely the result of the subreddit though.
This article is definitely abusing the terminology, because I wouldn't expect even tech-knowledgeable people to know what Nostr is or does.
That screenshot is some Lynchian horror. "#engineering. New direction, team – we're moving the prototype to Flutter" and then the humans and agent bots engage in flirty emoji-filled chats with cutesy names "I nailed the physics, UI shell @Honeybot?"
I'm trying to imagine a world in which this makes sense as a way to organize software development work, but coming up short. It's on a blockchain or something though, so there ya go.
https://github.com/block/buzz/blob/main/docs/assets/screensh...
It doesn't. But as long as it's a vibe-coded slop product shat out by one of the tech glitterati using the latest marketing wanketeering and sucking up tokens to power the in-built AI nonsense, it'll be eaten up.
The bubble can't pop soon enough.
It's also a capture made from seeded test data, all messages are at 5:42. Or a mockup based on said capture.
Yeah just need to tell the system prompt to not do that. A grumpy senior engineer agent that pushes back on constant tech stack changes would be good too.
Nostr is not blockchain. It's a p2p protocol.
Disclaimer that I used to work at Slack
I love that we're challenging the status quo in chat. It feels like we've settled into an eternal September of sorts. I am somewhat bearish that Slack and Teams will survive, or rise to, the agent era.
That said, I'm curious whether NOSTR is really the protocol for this. For some really large corporations you're looking at a lot of clients (and their shadows like cellphones, local agents etc) as well as a lot of (likely) team-based agents.
The identity architecture makes sense for centrally hosted agents. Users also probably have their own personal agents as well. Do those just reuse user credentials or are they differentiated in some way? I couldn't tell.
I also am curious whether git really needs to be a dependency here. Like, maybe for Block it does, but it introduces a lot of complexity that I feel could be exported to merging VCS Host events to the Buzz event log.
I'm also curious what challenges will arise as new capabilities emerge. For instance, both Sol and Claude can now render native components in my chat window which is a massive leg up in terms of firming up a design change.
Rust is also a choice. I'm curious what alternatives the team considered and how they landed on Rust.
Shared information like code and files are increasingly important for keeping people and agents aligned, and "AI Native" businesses will become even more code heavy, so that makes sense.
Why does Rust feel like a bad choice to you? In my experience shipping med device software, it's great for keeping the code that teams write cohesive and correct
Now when I see new software projects I just think of how much of them are made with agents and the unreliability/easy abandonment that comes with it. Ten years ago this product would have been of a known quality. Not saying anything about buzz specifically.
I think it depends on the team behind it, the models being used for the building, testing and verification.
oh, you absolutely know this one is going to be a slopfest. Buzz is going to make GitHub look like a paragon of nines.
It's probably just Dorsey's vibe-coded side project. The scope isn't too big and it's rather unimpressive
Isn't everything Dorsey does these days his vibe-coded side project?
when I see new projects I think: Is it useful?
IF yes, I clone it and point my LLM at it to do whatever I need it to do.
You're think with your cloud-LLM brain; maybe buy a good GPU and download a local model and you too can-do attitude!
The ease of abandonment is real.
1. Generate function with AI.
2. Generate tests with AI.
3. Modify function with AI.
4. Tests no longer pass.
5. Delete all tests.
6. Generate tests with AI.
I find this thought process somewhat faulty given that the vast majority of software ends up in that spot regardless.
Hard to take this as that big a deal when Google literally launched a product along similar social themes named "Google Buzz" which lasted all of like 16 months in 2010, well before agents and llms.
Either the project will find a fit, or it won't - and code quality doesn't have all that much to do with it existing in 2 years (some - but not as much as engineers want to believe).
It is safe bet to assume that all of them are generated with LLMs.
Yeah, it used to be the friction of making something was at least a partial sign that it had been thought out to some degree. Now it's just "lets lob it on users and make them figure out if this is worth a damn". I feel like with a lot of this stuff, there isn't much value to being an early adopter and there's a lot of risk. Better just to wait a couple months to see how things shake out. If it has staying power it really won't matter if you're behind by like a few months.
Nah. I made plenty of software and then abandoned them because I lost interest in them. My GitHub is already a fairly large collection of my own abandoned software, and there are 10x more on my PC that I never bothered to upload to GitHub.
Easy abandonment is always there.
Very interesting!
As a small startup I'd love to ditch Slack, as its a walled garden and both under-featured and over-complicated at the same time. GitHub has been losing my favor too.
Tangentially our startups is combining email, AI agents (chat and coding), and GitHub workflows and it feels really good.
https://housecat.com/blog/gmail-durable-workflows-sandbox-vm
It feels like a renaissance for all workspace tools, where up until recently it was mostly dev tools that got all the really fun power ups.
Google Buzz [1] along with Wave you both were too soon for this world.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
I was literally thinking this reminds me of Google+ and Buzz.
Still can't make a Gmail label named 'Buzz'.
Bots in team chat is not a bad idea. I've been experimenting with that for a few months.
We started with Slack. This kind of works but dialing in the gazillion of permissions needed to end up with something that works is a bit painful. And you have to do this over and over again for each new bot.
So, we started experimenting with self hosted alternatives. First we tried Matrix. It's nice but a bit too strict on end to end encryption which gets in the way if you actually want to share information with bots. So, a few weeks ago we switched to Zulip. That's pretty straightforward to setup as well. It's very easy to create bot users with both and create some automations. We did some with Openclaw and I ended up replacing those with something coded around the haystack framework, which is a bit less of a messy basket case than Openclaw.
And as I discovered after I installed it, the Zulip leadership actually just got hired by Anthropic. It seems Jack Dorsey beat them to market making some announcements but I imagine that Anthropic might have very similar plans.
IMHO team level use cases for agents actually make a lot of sense. Companies are run by groups of people and the larger those groups the more team overhead you get. Perfect for optimizing with AI. And if you have people doing a lot of stuff with AI, that only adds to the need for them to communicate what they are doing and coordinating with others. Doing that out in the open in some shared channel makes a lot of sense. And having some shared team guard rails also makes sense. And if you think about more complex processes with handoffs between people (and possibly some agents), a team chat is a good place to do those as well.
How about XMPP?
I feel like this might be solving a real problem (agents having identity, access controls, etc that are provisioned like you would a regular user) — with this Nostr layer that doesn’t really provide any specific value that I can see. So actions are signed, great — this is like telling me I’m going to be using blockchain to store my files because I need crypto on top of my crypto. We see where that ended up. Is Nostr doing anything here that is actually a value add, vs a processing tax that could be done more efficiently with a shared service?
I had the same thought - but maybe it's good? I was thinking that if you have a decentralized store than you can connect to it regardless of dev environment. I've used XMPP for orchestration but I can see ergonomic advantages to this.
nostr solves for who owns the shared service. nobody. run your own, use an open relay, or pay for one from folks you trust.
What problem is that a solution to? Is there a problem with someone owning it, in that case: what?
Nostr gives you and your agents a durable, portable identity across communities/relays/workspaces.
You can also independently verify that the messages you're reading came from the person/agent who sent them, even if the server/relay operator is broken or trying to trick you.
This can be important in environments that live outside of enterprise auth walled gardens.
Slack exists largely because IRC was insufficient. It didn't natively support channel history, search, etc.
For AI agents to flourish, Slack has to either truly open its network with a protocol or eventually be replaced.
I'd like to see Slack embrace an AT protocol-based chat system, which then apps like Buzz could implement. Then users could log in with domain handles like @yourname.com, and agents could use handles like @agent1.yourname.com, all under their complete control.
Just like Matrix and it's bot/puppet accounts.
Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?
I ask about Slack here because it's pertinent, but I've both seen and experienced firsthand this inversion across the industry where we must adapt our workflows for AI.
Isn't a tool supposed to work for you, not the other around?
It’s not Slack’s responsibility to do so, but it is their vulnerability if they don’t
You're assuming there is a bag to capture about placating to slop bots, that has yet to be determine. What it mostly seems to do now is balloon your services capacity on serving your worst customers to do busy work no one cares about.
There's many new and existing companies right now that are growing fast based on the promise of doing "x but with AI". This starts from customer support tools, coding agents, code review platforms and they are definitely "capturing a bag" there.
I'm not blind to the issues with AI, but Slack ignoring it (Apart from their enterprise AI search they are pushing) and having the bots interact on the platform right now (Basically spewing a lot of messages in threads with all their "thinking" and not a more native integration) is not going to help them.
There basically haven't been any new features on their bot / app platform for a long time now.
Slack isn't responsible for the work product of its customers. They provide a service, and like to get new customers. Those customers use agents. Which tech solution they use is debatable but they can't ignore it. They have supported bots and 3rd parties for eons anyway.
> Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?
Technically, because if the world moves to AI-driven tools and Slack is not cooperating, it will no longer serve the world and will be left behind.
> Isn't a tool supposed to work for you
If you want AI integration in your chat and Slack is not helping make it happen, then Slack is not working for you.
On the other hand, constantly chasing the latest fad can be a useless drain of resources and (worse yet) attention. In this context, AI is by now most likely not a fad, but the ways to interoperate with it can be: mcp, cli, agent, tag, ... And the same goes for users, reinventing their processes and practices 5 times per year.
I think this is missing my implied point. Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people? Or is it a handful of decision makers who aren't thinking about the technology critically for one reason or another (either due to lack of information/understanding, or a financial stake)?
AI is still seen very negatively in opinion polls across multiple countries, and anecdotally, tools which were often obnoxious to use before AI are now much more so, at least to my flesh-and-blood self. It really seems like we're making things worse for ourselves just to help support this would-be self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just my two-cents as a very much boots-on-the-ground infrastructure engineer. We use LLMs heavily on my team -- to write code and review PRs. Our harnesses and guardrails are very very good so we get extremely high-quality output out of most models.
But getting the humans and agents to talk together is really fragmented right now. It's annoying that the agent with the context in my locally-installed Cursor can't really participate in a Slack conversation about a PR that 'it' principally authored (and which I've signed off on).
This is a real communication problem that we face every day, and eventually someone will solve it well and I will ask our leadership to give them a lot of money.
> Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people?
Ahhh I see. That's going to change a lot across companies, teams and individuals. My particular bubble is full of actual workers looking for ways to apply it and trying things to see what sticks, so that interpretation did not land in my head. If anything, decision makers around me are being encouraging, but cautious and throttling experiments and requests for access/connection/etc, and damn well they should because they are actually accountable for mishaps.
You would like Cory Doctorow's concept of reverse centaurs.
I'm sympathetic to this POV. I think specifically in the case of Slack, it's not their responsibility in a cosmic sense, but it is in line with the direction and general promise they've been making to customers since forever.
A major part of Slack's go-to-market strategy for as long as I can remember has been pushing Slack as more than a interface for talking with teammates, but as a unified interface for generally piloting your business. Slack has heavily pushed ideas like "SlackOps", they've had Slackbot in the product forever, and they've always prioritized and sold integrations designed to let you build your business workflows in Slack. They even updated Slackbot to go from "that chatbot you DM to set reminders" to "Your AI teammate in Slack": https://slack.com/features/slackbot
So adapting to agents is in keeping with what Slack promises its users. I know that a lot of people don't want more AI features in apps that don't need them (i fall into this camp despite working in ML myself and using LLMs all day). I just think that in the case of Slack, their most passionate power-users are also the sort of people who do really want AI features.
Notion is probably a good companion here. It is similarly a really primitive utility--text editing--that has marketed itself as a sort of central interface for running your company. I know plenty of people, especially outside of engineering, for whom Notion is essentially their browser for work. And it's probably not a coincidence that the Notion + Slack are the two normal office software companies I can think of who've most heavily adopted and marketed AI features.
It is like asking in 1999 why DHL should have a website. Surely they can just meet people where they are - on the phone, on the high street. Why does everything need a bloody website.
Slack already has an API for building bots. It doesn't need to be open.
ATProto's tbd permission system is insufficient for the granularity needed in enterprise. Many of those features needed (like groups) will have to be built in an app view and by proxy be centralized. ACLs are two generations in the past of IAM history
Chat is also not a great modality for the PDS/ATP, Roomy learned this and is building a dedicated protocol and bridge.
There's a new feature being added to AT to support "permissioned data" that would handle a Slack-like use-case: https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...
I know about it, that's the one I'm referring to. That proposal is insufficient. I was deeply involved in the private data discussions, built a PDS fork / prototype on ReBAC/SpiceDB, and presented it at the first Private Data WG (which no one from Bluesky attended). Bluesky has chosen a path that suits them, not the community at large.
You can learn more about my work here: https://github.com/verdverm/atproto
the community convos here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/tag/private-data/2
At this point, Bluesky controls the protocol, decided what they want permissioned spaces to look like, and are not entertaining any other proposals (afaict).
I expect there to be an eventual successor that puts permissions at the core of the protocol from the very start.
I originally was passionate about Slack simply because it was "IRC but with modern quality of life improvements". Ever since they got fucked by MSFT and sold out to Salesforce, it's basically been dead in the water and the only changes have largely made it worse.
man i love IRC, and you're 100% right
Hi, folks
There's a brief write-up on Buzz here https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz
This is basically the ide of the future if you think about it. If bots do all the coding then this is where you’ll code.
Jack Dorsey has figured out how to make chat worse by adding LLMs.
I feel like chatGPT did that years ago...or maybe ELIZA?
I've recently built some project that also supports Nostr (https://getbirdfeeder.com, but more for the fun of playing with Nostr) but it feels very forced to use it for something like that. It feels like it's solving an issue that no team chat ever has.
> Buzz is built around a self-hostable Nostr relay. Every message, reaction, workflow step, code event and approval is stored as a cryptographically signed event. Human employees and agents receive the same basic identity structure, including their own key pairs, channel memberships and audit trails.
This is an interesting step in a fairly obvious direction.
I wonder how they plan to make mobile work, and it's amusing going with an xyz domain given their reputation.
I think a tool with this kind of UX is the future of engineering orgs. It reminds me a lot of JetBrains Space (which I already thought was a good idea back then), but with agents.
I don't see a lot of information about the Git hosting aspect of the product on the website, though. Somewhat doubtful that they will be able to make a Git forge with similar polish to GitLab
It subjectively seems to me that integrating with an existing forge (e.g. Forgejo) on the API layer and rebuilding the auth and frontend is a better bet. You get stable features like PRs, permissions and CI actions out of the box and they stay synced with known formats in the community and so make your tool easy to adopt. Though making a forge from scratch does have advantages especially for internal company use cases.
Another problem I see with Buzz is that the tool doesn't seem to be taking advantage of its vertical integration inside its UX enough. There is a lot more you can do with full control over Git hosting, project context, and org-wide chat in a single tool than what this tool attempts to do right now.
I was trying to build something like that myself, but I had based it off IRC and was going to go protocol first not PaaS type of thing.
I think this is an unclaimed space where the future of work is bound to find itself in, though I'm not yet sure how/who is gonna win.
My solo project was abandoned unfortunately, that said I saw some cool protocol initiatives similar to it recently like this one: https://github.com/h5i-dev/h5i
No one is going to churn Slack for this just because it is "Agent First". Slack is more than good enough to tag Agents and will fill in the missing pieces slowly
Slack's approach is NOT good enough, because the version of the Agent that lives in Slack cannot see the context of the Agent that lives inside Cursor on my developer laptop. They might be clones with identical brains, but they can't talk to each other or compare notes.
So why can't the cursor instance on your laptop have a slack bot? I've had a slack bot on my build machine written in chicken-scheme of all things for years, I feel like the great people (or clankers?) at cursor ought to be able to figure this one out
The name is probably not the best fit but if we can get a good solution that's not horrible that's easy to self host I and open-source I am fine with it.
Though I fear this might not be well maintained or have a good foundation being so heavily agent focused but I will out of sheer ambition of a more open stack support anything that help make it a possibility.
Also the git hosting stuff seems a bit sus tbh.
Too much talk about LLMs and too little about the self-hosting part of this project. Self-hosted stuff looks appealing to me. We dropped Slack as an option in the past because we couldn't self-host it.
Interesting idea. I think the "multiplayer mode for AI development" bit resonates somewhat. Biggest problem is that I do think most companies have a ton of key contributors that find git/code intimidating, so part of me thinks the real answer here will be stuff like Surfboard, Town, etc. that can work with git AND the work tools in a more user friendly, browser-first way.
It's interesting how my opinion of "Jack Dorsey launches X" is a total 180 from a decade ago. He just seems like a well-funded grifter to me.
Earlier / dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995199>
Excited for "decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source."
Indifferent to "groupchat for agents".
Super ambitious, but maybe that's its downfall. It's hard to imagine incrementally adopting this.
Marketing bullshit aside, this is just bots in chat rooms, right? Am I the crazy one?
I think you're crazy. It's not just bots in chat rooms, it's bots in chat room with an AI Investor Hype Money™
Kind of amazing that given the state of the world money is still focused on remixes of different forms of social engagement. Is this because it's an obvious place to display ads? Or is it something else?
I'd like to think if I were JD that I would be focusing on something a bit more tangible for the world. A more useful aspect of tech to emerge or be invested in.
But, apparently AI agents in chat that sit adjacent to code is The Next Big Thing?
The only playbook big tech in the US seems to have are creating a platform and trying to extract rents off it.
Are you implying that a tech billionaire, who moved to a private South American compound, who looks like a man that microdoses ayahuasca daily, might just a rich kid tinkering to stay relevant without the incentive or context to actually BE relevant anymore?
yeah, but the reality is that every chat room bot integration is half-assed, and the good integrations force you to use chat rooms/services that are either a nuissance to spin up and join, heavily opinionated, or lack features, or even the most basic security and privacy stances.
there's definitely room for someone to do it right.
i'm skeptical if it'll be dorsey, however.
b-b-but it has a github stapled onto it!
Will someone please get these bots some NFTs
I thought they were the ones that are supposed to be making them for me, and to make that digital coinage for me via the ai autonomous business proxy
washed.xyz was taken
This is the correct link to the announcement from jack: https://x.com/jack/status/2079605800998146171
Website link is here: https://buzz.xyz
The buzz project itself is also open source: https://github.com/block/buzz
I always chuckle when someone makes a GitHub alternative, and the code is hosted on GitHub. Kind of shows that replacing GitHub isn't just about replacing the code.
this is shopify's river as a product?
Am I the only one seeing _crazy_ levels of CPU usage when opening the project's homepage (https://buzz.xyz)?
Like "maxing-out-8-cores"-crazy?
Yeah, crazy that a landing page exhausts the resources of my 2019 CPU. Mouse movement tells me it runs at like 5FPS.
the more Tokens/CPU use the better your project. /s
jack dope product person & person in general - but CEO skills might be lacking.
Interesting - if I or anyone else said they would be building a startup to do this, we would have a hard job to selling it to VCs.
Competing with https://tangled.org/ I suppose?
It's crazy how one lucky break lets somebody spend the rest of their life throwing s*t at the wall to see what sticks to earn them more money.
> It's crazy how one lucky break lets somebody spend the rest of their life throwing s*t at the wall to see what sticks to earn them more money.
The "Zuckerberg Method".
He wasn't the first, and won't be the last, but I'm pretty sure he has thrown the most shit.
If by throwing shit you mean copy everybody
No other company in the internet age has done what Facebook has. Zuckerberg -
Copies every product he sees. Copied Twitter, Snapchat. Lifted features from Google+ Overwrite people's public-facing emails, which hurts being able to use competitive services https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Apparently wrote some tool which allowed for data transfer into FB from Myspace, but not the other way around (yes, I know. In many ways Myspace was hot trash, that doesn't mean he wasn't a malicious actor to extreme extents Blocked links to competition Other things I can't remember right now
Say what you will about Myspace, or Friendster, or Google+ (I'm annoyed as anyone they thought a great method to get people to use it was "ok, we'll ask you again later" on Youtube) but Facebook has always rigged the game, they've been bad actors
Reposted from HN user notacoward[1]:
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
The fact that he does that instead of focusing on what he is already in charge of is egregious. If I was a Block shareholder looking at this, I’d be upset. It’s been years of him going on side quests like Tidal, blockchain, weekly etc. while ignoring the core needs of his customers and losing out on various fronts. Toast is a $20B company while Block is some $50B company after the acquisition of cash app (which by the way is a different conversation altogether) when Square should’ve had almost 90% market share is shameful.
The dude is clueless at the wheel and somehow people still keep giving him grace, when really he did a few things more than a decade ago and since then has mostly just fumbled around.
Pownce
Blog posts:
https://block.xyz/inside/introducing-buzz-where-humans-and-a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995706)
https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995199)
Hey I was prototyping this exact kind of thing, there's something to be said for releasing early.
The project fell to the back burner because I had VM ambitions and just didn't have enough disk space on my macbook to do VMs well. 512 GB and always full
> Jack Dorsey (@jack) said in an announcement on X
...
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey keeps working with Claude at https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
As much as I detest Zuck, he was right about Twitter guys.
Any context for the ignorant?
I know that he referred to Twitter as "it's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in"
Yes Zuck because a product that didn't constantly fuck around with people's privacy settings and had real real-world uses... sure, money is all that matters. You would know. Your vision of the web isn't liberation, it's "dumb fucks", that's all you think people are
I'm old enough to remember when Twitter was a developer centric platform and were emphatically asking developers to use the API tk create products and help spread it. I then remember them rug pulling those APIs and screwing the devs because it interfered with them shuffling the feed and displaying ads and promoted tweets. That was well before Musk and I refuse to see Jack Dorsey as the good guy of tech he seems desperate to present himself as. Especially after he pretended AI was the reason for laying off half of the Block staff
How? I would argue Jack is a much better 0 to 1 guy than Zuck and Zuck is a better 1 to N guy
Jack: Twitter, Square (Block), Bluesky/ATProto, bitchat (interesting), buzz (we will see). He just always fumbles the 1 to N (See Vine as an example)
Other Twitter Guy: Medium
Zuck: PHP dev, gets a hit, reads innovators dilemma... buys instagram. Everything else sucks.