> 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.
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.
I remember when the sub was first created, I think there was an understanding it didn’t actually mean you were explaining to five year olds. Hard to recall exactly when it was created though, so definitely awhile ago.
It’s way older than Reddit, it’s older than the Office. I remember Denzel Washington saying it in some movie when I was a kid, and I doubt it originated there. Doesn’t Einstein have a quotation about it, too?
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.
Seriously, what's hope is left for adults when a 5 year old understands signed Nostr events? The ELI-SWE is the docs I guess? I want to get off the Silicon Valley marketing express.
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.
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.
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.
Every time I see some vibecoded AI slop project announcement where there is almost 1 emoji per line I want to reach out across the internet and punch the "author" in the face.
This shit is infesting every online discussion forum I'm in.
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.
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.
They certainly can on Business and Enterprise plans. There’s some lip service to following employee policy and applicable laws, but if the policy allows (most do), and you’re in the US, the admins can do it.
If you wrote it on your company's slack space, it is not really private to the company. Everytime I have a "private" conversation in Slack I have the understanding that the information could be shared. Even now there is a share button not for the whole conversation but yes for individual messages
It's potentially open to the public as well, given the right legal action. The Enron email dump revealed secrets that presumably ended several marriages.
Well the Enron dump was in the early 2000s, a lot of that stuff (irrelevant to the litigation) would get sealed these days. There were things like social security #s and bank accounts in there.
Every thread participant should check [_] I agree before the thread is published.
An inappropriate message may not be about something unsavory but about something private. Information about a contract which is not yet public. A discussion of a candidate who is then hired, and reads it. Etc.
1. A workspace admin or 2. by permission of all on thread, or AI inspects contents and gates on 1 or 2 if anything sensitive. This isn't 1990, we can program stuff now.
The OPs comments weren’t just a hypothetical. We’ve already seen numerous instances where agents have leaked private data. Even GitHub’s own Copilot has been found guilty of these vulnerabilities.
I agree. We have a leadership channel at work for well, the leadership team. Those conversations are sensitive. Evaluations, hiring bands, salaries, future product planning, markets, funding, etc. Access to that channel is strictly controlled. I am not worried about anyone taking a screenshot. In the case of allowing an AI agent to participate in the channel, I would be worried about that AI using information from that channel to answer a question outside of that channel. Keeping the agents "learnings" clearly behind a "firewall" would be of great importance.
Beyond that, the team are free to have private conversations between themselves. This is NOT something we log. At the end of the day, hiring good people and trusting them is important. The logic of making sure the AI does not leak those conversations also applies.
It is a new world, re:AI. It has its uses and things are changing at a rapid pace. It is not clear to be the protections we have implemented in todays paradigms are well implemented yet in the new AI world.
What a curious thing to say. My impression has been, if you put the accomplishments of computer science prior to 1990 against those subsequent, the prior would be more impressive, perhaps by a lot.
The issue is when users interact with claude, what can they see? If the AI can see super-secret-payroll-details.md - is it allowed to discuss that with any user? is there some sort of internal ACL within claude that asks pretty please don't tell everyone they're underpaid?
That's why multiuser agents can be an issue.
The other way to do this, is to have claude installed for everyone, and any user's chat with claude uses their personal permissions via something like oauth delegation or AWS IAM role kinda things. But that, again, is complicated ACL logic living through the delegation of roles and access
I'm not sure the permissions problem is solved even if we assume models inherit user permissions. Imagine I'm a manager and someone contacts me about an HR incident involving one of my reports, or other sensitive information. The agent probably shouldn't have access unless I explicitly provide it.
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.
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.
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
> not ok - reading the agents shared inbox in a public setting - probably ok depending on the threat model
This is never secure. Some SAAS apps have automatic enrollment into company/teams based on email domain. So you can sign up with the email address of the agent and then ask for any 2fa code or other emails.
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?
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.
Totally get that for code! But there are orgs where non-code things are compartmentalised — maybe for leak reasons — that still want to employees to make use of agents.
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.
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.
And? Your opinions are either insightful or they aren't. Who you work for is irrelevant.
This also isn't the brag that you seem to think it is. Your client can't even keep straight "what was the last thing I read in this channel." I'm constantly having to scroll back down because slack thinks I last was in the channel a day or two ago, not 5 minutes ago. It's also hopelessly bloated, uses GPU time when nothing on the screen is changing, slow, thinks everything is a URL, and the link previewer seems perpetually down.
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.
I think a happy medium like signal would be much better, slack is an immovable part of much of the (white-collar) business relationship world now but it'd be nice if there were assurances of secrecy and security in communication as 24/7 cyberattacks rather than a company whose security is based solely on promises rather than zero-knowledge systems. Signal has had far and away the best cross-platform messaging experience of any client I've used in friend groups but moving to a slack-like system alongside what exists now would be much appreciated to the noisy channel approach.
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
I'm not saying it's a bad choice. Slack is written in Hack, Discord written in Elixir, and Teams is written in C#. Why teams choose languages is always a point of curiosity to me.
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.
Not at all the same thing. Your half-baked works can't appear to be anything else than what they actually are. You are in no damnger of wasting anyone's time.
For one thing, you probably never tried to mislead anyone. Did you put 8 minutes of effort into something and then come here and try to say "Hey world, here is a thing you should all care about and invest in. I mean, I didn't, but you should."?
But even if you did try, you physically cannot (5 years ago) generate the equivalent of 10 years of work by a 10 person team complete with docs and tests that all looks plausible and maybe even runs.
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'm curious how this will play out. So far having agents in a group chats with multiple people is hard. Either the agent creates a different "thread" internally for each user and everyone has a 1 on 1 convo with the agent in the same group chat, or it's just chaos.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like the economics of software are shifting. If companies can afford software tailored to their exact workflows for less than the annual cost of a single engineer, what does the moat of a traditional SaaS company become?
I think most companies have realized there is substantial value in terms of security maintenance, stability and the contractual obligations associated with SaaS vendors versus internal vibe-coded tools. Certainly there is a place for tailored internal tooling. But it isn't going to magically replace every use case that SaaS vendors are purpose built around solving, at least not anytime soon.
Convenience. Most companies aren't software companies and know this intimately. Even if they can build a prototype using LLMs, they now have to at a bare minimum hire someone who can maintain it (additional cost). Not to mention compliance with regulations. Far easier (and cheaper) to just pay someone else to make all of that their problem and extract the value from the product (even if it's not a perfect fit for their business).
Let's make the whole working/colaborating environment a training input for the model, we have to replace each and every link of human everywhere, think about the stock prices... yes it will have cathastropic consequences to succeed but then think again when you vest in 40 years you will be rich!
and then the first reply is someone saying that if not someone else will...
and then another saying that the whole idea of business is to make money...
and then another that the guy from valve is a jerk...
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?
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.
I like that using keypairs and signed messages inverts the centralised server and SaaS model and makes things more local/client first. I wish more products would move that way.
Nostr seems like a reasonably convenient way to achieve that without building everything from scratch, but maybe there a better ways?
The story right now is to own the least you possibly can, at least if you're a business. If I can buy it that's usually the right choice, in terms of opportunity cost if nothing else.
consignment to existence as a cloud serf. paying rents to have your data held hostage and exploited by a third party. maybe these aren't problems for you
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.
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.
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.
> It’s great and works really well for us, but it raises lots of questions. Does everyone get a bot? If people share one, whose credentials does it use?
Eventually you throw in this admission in the middle of other stuff:
> Buzz gives each agent its own key. The agent’s owner signs a narrowly scoped authorization. The agent then signs its own work with its own identity.
So you're explicitly picking a bot per person, you're just calling them an agent. But you never really admit this because you call it 'an agent' rather than "the user's agent". You're still ending up with lots of agents each owned by people, you're just writing another orchestration layer yourself.
> The agent remains the author. Its credential proves who authorized it and under what conditions.
Right yeh, so the human is the responsible party.
> If an agent key leaks, revoke the agent without replacing the human identity behind it.
Just like you revoke an app-key on GitHub/Slack. This isn't a revolutionary thing you're doing.
You then throw in this curveball.
> Buzz can also run an agent’s model requests on another community member’s machine.
How? How is this resource managed or limited? Do I have to assume Buzz will just borrow my laptop's CPU & GPU at random?
> So you're explicitly picking a bot per person, you're just calling them an agent. But you never really admit this because you call it 'an agent' rather than "the user's agent". You're still ending up with lots of agents each owned by people, you're just writing another orchestration layer yourself.
Giving everyone their own agent/bot/app in Slack is nontrivial because of how Slack apps work. If you're okay with them impersonating you, it's easy, but that's weird and I don't like having to guess/discern if I'm talking to you or a bot wearing your face
> How? How is this resource managed or limited? Do I have to assume Buzz will just borrow my laptop's CPU & GPU at random?
This is opt in. It's an integration with https://github.com/Mesh-LLM/mesh-llm that scopes shared compute to your Buzz community. This is very early right now and we're working to get it right. But the idea of a totally self-sovereign, self-hosted community providing its own inference is exciting.
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.
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.
Would it be uncharitable to say we are reinventing all of the awful single pane of glass / enterprise orchestration platforms of the 2010s but making them 'fun'?
Seems to be an raft.build competitor but open source.
BTW, from my very own opinion, IM is a great place for agents to chat, but not a good place for get work done. Something more comprehensive like Linear should be work better. Communication is a key stone but not all for the agents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
The phrase was in an episode of The Office prior to that. I think it's fairly old.
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.
I remember when the sub was first created, I think there was an understanding it didn’t actually mean you were explaining to five year olds. Hard to recall exactly when it was created though, so definitely awhile ago.
It’s way older than Reddit, it’s older than the Office. I remember Denzel Washington saying it in some movie when I was a kid, and I doubt it originated there. Doesn’t Einstein have a quotation about it, too?
I remember someone saying it in high school back in the late 90s or early 00s.
Are you smarter than a five year old, kinda show
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein (allegedly :))
I always thought that the quote was with "5 year old" and that it was the reason for ELI5 :)
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.
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.
They’re all digital natives now, dontcha know
Seriously, what's hope is left for adults when a 5 year old understands signed Nostr events? The ELI-SWE is the docs I guess? I want to get off the Silicon Valley marketing express.
The goal is to replace these 5 year old with a team of Nostr aware agents. /s
I imagine that's all very understandable to the average Bay Area five-year-old.
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's also a capture made from seeded test data, all messages are at 5:42. Or a mockup based on said capture.
Nostr is not blockchain. It's a p2p protocol.
Maybe they meant git? Not right either but less wrong.
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.
Are you making a joke? Not being snarky, I actually can't tell if it's a real suggestion or satirical.
Half joking, half serious. We need AI to challenge assumptions to not just "you are absolutely correct" all the time.
I really need these LLMs to start being more like the gate keeping assholes of StackOverflow. Just a little dash of that energy would go a long way.
Don’t forget to light some candles and invoke the name of the Omnissiah while you’re at it.
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.
Oh, is this a thing?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glitterati
> people who are famous, wealthy
Oh, okay...
> and attractive
lost me
Every time I see some vibecoded AI slop project announcement where there is almost 1 emoji per line I want to reach out across the internet and punch the "author" in the face.
This shit is infesting every online discussion forum I'm in.
I would ask that someone shoot me in the face before I engaged with this slop.
Me: Shoot me in the face, @cringebot
Cringebot: :salute: on it!
[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.
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
That's a good operating assumption, and I usually think this way too.
It turns out Slack actually requires legal process or consent of parties to provide private messages to admins: https://slack.com/help/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-imp...
But of course yes, another party could simply take a screenshot
They certainly can on Business and Enterprise plans. There’s some lip service to following employee policy and applicable laws, but if the policy allows (most do), and you’re in the US, the admins can do it.
It is. Firm I worked at had AI summarized chats delivered to admins and upper level management.
If you talk shit about your superiors, it will get back to them. Same with "anonymous" surveys.
love how we have technology that would have made Beria nut in his pants, now available to every pointy-haired boss
i'm thinking of moving to a cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Montana
If you wrote it on your company's slack space, it is not really private to the company. Everytime I have a "private" conversation in Slack I have the understanding that the information could be shared. Even now there is a share button not for the whole conversation but yes for individual messages
It's potentially open to the public as well, given the right legal action. The Enron email dump revealed secrets that presumably ended several marriages.
Well the Enron dump was in the early 2000s, a lot of that stuff (irrelevant to the litigation) would get sealed these days. There were things like social security #s and bank accounts in there.
Every thread participant should check [_] I agree before the thread is published.
An inappropriate message may not be about something unsavory but about something private. Information about a contract which is not yet public. A discussion of a candidate who is then hired, and reads it. Etc.
consent in a company managed chat app doesn’t exist
Who would put a career ruining message on slack or any other company platform/service?
Seemingly benign and/or entirely work-related messages can turn out to be career-ending when weaponized by the company.
Or a coworker with an ax to grind.
Your Slack admin can read all messages regardless of where it was posted via SIEM
1. A workspace admin or 2. by permission of all on thread, or AI inspects contents and gates on 1 or 2 if anything sensitive. This isn't 1990, we can program stuff now.
The OPs comments weren’t just a hypothetical. We’ve already seen numerous instances where agents have leaked private data. Even GitHub’s own Copilot has been found guilty of these vulnerabilities.
I agree. We have a leadership channel at work for well, the leadership team. Those conversations are sensitive. Evaluations, hiring bands, salaries, future product planning, markets, funding, etc. Access to that channel is strictly controlled. I am not worried about anyone taking a screenshot. In the case of allowing an AI agent to participate in the channel, I would be worried about that AI using information from that channel to answer a question outside of that channel. Keeping the agents "learnings" clearly behind a "firewall" would be of great importance.
Beyond that, the team are free to have private conversations between themselves. This is NOT something we log. At the end of the day, hiring good people and trusting them is important. The logic of making sure the AI does not leak those conversations also applies.
It is a new world, re:AI. It has its uses and things are changing at a rapid pace. It is not clear to be the protections we have implemented in todays paradigms are well implemented yet in the new AI world.
> This isn't 1990, we can program stuff now.
What a curious thing to say. My impression has been, if you put the accomplishments of computer science prior to 1990 against those subsequent, the prior would be more impressive, perhaps by a lot.
I programmed back then too so cheekiness applied mostly to me.
The only actually interesting thing about this regarding "career ruining messages" is how easy accidental disclosure violations would become.
That can already happen with screenshots
Publishing "career ruining " messages on a company managed chat app is probably a bad idea in general.
Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.
Edit: verified. You can do this but takes an extra step of converting to private channel first then swapping the channel mode.
Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.
Checked docks. You can convert any private chat into a private channel. Then swap the channel from private to public.
Lol. I'm a peasant.
I'm confused are against the idea of private groups at all or just that you can't change the visibility settings later on?
No, there's a place for private, but it should be rare and not default mode for all company business related comms.
The change is for when everyone realizes this is useful info, a decision was made, you want to share this more broadly. Very often imo.
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?
The issue is when users interact with claude, what can they see? If the AI can see super-secret-payroll-details.md - is it allowed to discuss that with any user? is there some sort of internal ACL within claude that asks pretty please don't tell everyone they're underpaid?
That's why multiuser agents can be an issue.
The other way to do this, is to have claude installed for everyone, and any user's chat with claude uses their personal permissions via something like oauth delegation or AWS IAM role kinda things. But that, again, is complicated ACL logic living through the delegation of roles and access
I'm not sure the permissions problem is solved even if we assume models inherit user permissions. Imagine I'm a manager and someone contacts me about an HR incident involving one of my reports, or other sensitive information. The agent probably shouldn't have access unless I explicitly provide it.
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.
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.
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
> not ok - reading the agents shared inbox in a public setting - probably ok depending on the threat model
This is never secure. Some SAAS apps have automatic enrollment into company/teams based on email domain. So you can sign up with the email address of the agent and then ask for any 2fa code or other emails.
> 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?
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.
Totally get that for code! But there are orgs where non-code things are compartmentalised — maybe for leak reasons — that still want to employees to make use of agents.
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.
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.
Seems easy for Buzz to solve. I’m just happy to have an alternative to Slack.
> I work for Slack
And? Your opinions are either insightful or they aren't. Who you work for is irrelevant.
This also isn't the brag that you seem to think it is. Your client can't even keep straight "what was the last thing I read in this channel." I'm constantly having to scroll back down because slack thinks I last was in the channel a day or two ago, not 5 minutes ago. It's also hopelessly bloated, uses GPU time when nothing on the screen is changing, slow, thinks everything is a URL, and the link previewer seems perpetually down.
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.
I think a happy medium like signal would be much better, slack is an immovable part of much of the (white-collar) business relationship world now but it'd be nice if there were assurances of secrecy and security in communication as 24/7 cyberattacks rather than a company whose security is based solely on promises rather than zero-knowledge systems. Signal has had far and away the best cross-platform messaging experience of any client I've used in friend groups but moving to a slack-like system alongside what exists now would be much appreciated to the noisy channel approach.
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
I'm not saying it's a bad choice. Slack is written in Hack, Discord written in Elixir, and Teams is written in C#. Why teams choose languages is always a point of curiosity to me.
Isn't this already offered in Slack by the leading LLM providers? You can connect Claude to Slack with a few clicks. Am I missing something?
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).
Usual dumbass argument I see everytime:
"Well, there was already useless apps, so why not use agents to make those useless apps".
Great times ahead lads..
And I find this thought process somewhat faulty.
Argument similar to: people still get hurt riding a skate without a helmet, why do I need it anyway?
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.
It is safe bet to assume that all of them are generated with LLMs.
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.
Not at all the same thing. Your half-baked works can't appear to be anything else than what they actually are. You are in no damnger of wasting anyone's time.
For one thing, you probably never tried to mislead anyone. Did you put 8 minutes of effort into something and then come here and try to say "Hey world, here is a thing you should all care about and invest in. I mean, I didn't, but you should."?
But even if you did try, you physically cannot (5 years ago) generate the equivalent of 10 years of work by a 10 person team complete with docs and tests that all looks plausible and maybe even runs.
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 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!
Google Buzz [1] along with Wave you both were too soon for this world.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz
Still can't make a Gmail label named 'Buzz'.
I was literally thinking this reminds me of Google+ and Buzz.
Jack Dorsey let the FBI and CIA run all through twitter under his ownership and stewardship
Why trust anything he does now ?
https://nypost.com/2022/12/24/latest-batch-of-twitter-files-...
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'm curious how this will play out. So far having agents in a group chats with multiple people is hard. Either the agent creates a different "thread" internally for each user and everyone has a 1 on 1 convo with the agent in the same group chat, or it's just chaos.
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?
> 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’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.
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.
You would like Cory Doctorow's concept of reverse centaurs.
Just like Matrix and it's bot/puppet accounts.
More like HipChat. You are off by like 15 years
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.
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.
man i love IRC, and you're 100% right
Slack already has an API for building bots. It doesn't need to be open.
Incredible. I don't think I've ever had the displeasure of visiting a website that has half a second of cursor movement lag before.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like the economics of software are shifting. If companies can afford software tailored to their exact workflows for less than the annual cost of a single engineer, what does the moat of a traditional SaaS company become?
I think most companies have realized there is substantial value in terms of security maintenance, stability and the contractual obligations associated with SaaS vendors versus internal vibe-coded tools. Certainly there is a place for tailored internal tooling. But it isn't going to magically replace every use case that SaaS vendors are purpose built around solving, at least not anytime soon.
Convenience. Most companies aren't software companies and know this intimately. Even if they can build a prototype using LLMs, they now have to at a bare minimum hire someone who can maintain it (additional cost). Not to mention compliance with regulations. Far easier (and cheaper) to just pay someone else to make all of that their problem and extract the value from the product (even if it's not a perfect fit for their business).
Let's make the whole working/colaborating environment a training input for the model, we have to replace each and every link of human everywhere, think about the stock prices... yes it will have cathastropic consequences to succeed but then think again when you vest in 40 years you will be rich!
and then the first reply is someone saying that if not someone else will... and then another saying that the whole idea of business is to make money... and then another that the guy from valve is a jerk...
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?
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.
I like that using keypairs and signed messages inverts the centralised server and SaaS model and makes things more local/client first. I wish more products would move that way.
Nostr seems like a reasonably convenient way to achieve that without building everything from scratch, but maybe there a better ways?
nostr solves for who owns the shared service. nobody. run your own, use an open relay, or pay for one from folks you trust.
The story right now is to own the least you possibly can, at least if you're a business. If I can buy it that's usually the right choice, in terms of opportunity cost if nothing else.
nostr doesn't make anyone buy any more or less than they want. it enables freedom of movement if your landlord becomes exploitative.
What problem is that a solution to? Is there a problem with someone owning it, in that case: what?
consignment to existence as a cloud serf. paying rents to have your data held hostage and exploited by a third party. maybe these aren't problems for you
> Is there a problem with someone owning it
Yes
> what?
They can decide you can't use it anymore
They can decide to charge more for it
They can arbitrarily take features out from under you or change how it works
They can read and/or sell/give away/accidentally get exploited and lose your data
They can prevent your extracting your data to move away from them
They can prevent you building or integrating other tools
They control how you can modify or configure the software
...
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.
Hot tip: if you disable JS on the site, then nothing but the title loads and you can disregard it without wasting all those CPU cycles.
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.
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.
Jack Dorsey has figured out how to make chat worse by adding LLMs.
I feel like chatGPT did that years ago...or maybe ELIZA?
We’re out of drinks. Can you two go get more wine coolers?
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.
Hi, folks
There's a brief write-up on Buzz here https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz
You start with this premise
> It’s great and works really well for us, but it raises lots of questions. Does everyone get a bot? If people share one, whose credentials does it use?
Eventually you throw in this admission in the middle of other stuff:
> Buzz gives each agent its own key. The agent’s owner signs a narrowly scoped authorization. The agent then signs its own work with its own identity.
So you're explicitly picking a bot per person, you're just calling them an agent. But you never really admit this because you call it 'an agent' rather than "the user's agent". You're still ending up with lots of agents each owned by people, you're just writing another orchestration layer yourself.
> The agent remains the author. Its credential proves who authorized it and under what conditions.
Right yeh, so the human is the responsible party.
> If an agent key leaks, revoke the agent without replacing the human identity behind it.
Just like you revoke an app-key on GitHub/Slack. This isn't a revolutionary thing you're doing.
You then throw in this curveball.
> Buzz can also run an agent’s model requests on another community member’s machine.
How? How is this resource managed or limited? Do I have to assume Buzz will just borrow my laptop's CPU & GPU at random?
Hi!
> So you're explicitly picking a bot per person, you're just calling them an agent. But you never really admit this because you call it 'an agent' rather than "the user's agent". You're still ending up with lots of agents each owned by people, you're just writing another orchestration layer yourself.
Giving everyone their own agent/bot/app in Slack is nontrivial because of how Slack apps work. If you're okay with them impersonating you, it's easy, but that's weird and I don't like having to guess/discern if I'm talking to you or a bot wearing your face
> How? How is this resource managed or limited? Do I have to assume Buzz will just borrow my laptop's CPU & GPU at random?
This is opt in. It's an integration with https://github.com/Mesh-LLM/mesh-llm that scopes shared compute to your Buzz community. This is very early right now and we're working to get it right. But the idea of a totally self-sovereign, self-hosted community providing its own inference is exciting.
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
I would pay money to not have to use slack
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.
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.
Would it be uncharitable to say we are reinventing all of the awful single pane of glass / enterprise orchestration platforms of the 2010s but making them 'fun'?
Disclaimer: I'm not working for them, just FYI.
Seems to be an raft.build competitor but open source.
BTW, from my very own opinion, IM is a great place for agents to chat, but not a good place for get work done. Something more comprehensive like Linear should be work better. Communication is a key stone but not all for the agents.
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.
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.
After selling Twitter to Elon, I trust Jack about as much as I trust Trump. And that's as far as I can throw Trump.
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.
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
b-b-but it has a github stapled onto it!
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.
Earlier / dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995199>
I think I'd rather retire than use that.
I suffered before I was able to click on the button to open github repo
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.
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 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.
(I work for Block, not on this)
Cash App was not an acquisition, it originated as a hackweek within (what was then called) Square.
Possibly you’re thinking of the Afterpay acquisition?
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
More people should be doing that instead of funding cryptofascist authoritarian dunderheads to undermine democracy.
> 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
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.
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.
No, me too. 758% processor usage in Firefox.
the more Tokens/CPU use the better your project. /s
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.
That Jack Dorsey?
Yes, the tall Peter Dinklage.
jack dope product person & person in general - but CEO skills might be lacking.
awful
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.
I honestly wonder how this brainstorming session started...
this is shopify's river as a product?
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
Competing with https://tangled.org/ I suppose?
washed.xyz was taken
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey keeps working with Claude at https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
> Jack Dorsey (@jack) said in an announcement on X
...
As much as I detest Zuck, he was right about Twitter guys.
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.
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
Fair enough
lol