Block's Agent Workspace Buzz Still Calls Itself a Prototype

Block, the payments company behind Square and Cash App, published Buzz, a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same chat rooms, on its engineering blog on July 21. Two months later, GitHub's own metadata for the repository still classifies Buzz's maturity as "prototype," even as the project has passed 34,831 stars and 4,594 forks.

Tyler Longwell, the Block engineer who wrote the launch post, said the project exists because "the bottleneck moved from intelligence to coordination," calling that "a workspace problem" rather than a modeling one. Buzz answers it by giving AI agents the same standing as people: every participant, human or agent, gets an independent Schnorr cryptographic keypair, according to Open Source For You's coverage of the launch, and every message, code change and workflow event lands as a signed entry in one shared log, Longwell wrote.

What is actually running underneath

Buzz is written in Rust and organized into focused crates, including buzz-core for protocol types, buzz-relay for an Axum-based WebSocket and REST server, and buzz-acp for the agent-facing surface, according to the project's own repository. That last piece connects to the Agent Client Protocol, which already drives Block's own open-source coding agent, Goose, alongside OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code. A self-hosted deployment needs Postgres for stored events, Redis for pub-sub and presence, and S3-compatible storage for media, the repository says, all run through a provided Docker Compose bundle rather than a managed cloud service.

Metric	Figure
GitHub stars	34,831
Forks	4,594
Open issues	3,663
Latest desktop release	v0.5.25

A prototype with 3,663 open issues

Buzz's latest desktop build, version 0.5.25, shipped Sept. 24 and included a fix for routing Anthropic model calls made through Databricks, along with a new opt-in setting for how conversation threads load. The same release's Windows installer is still named with an "alpha-unsigned" tag, meaning it ships without the code-signing certificate a production Windows build would carry. The repository's open-issue count, 3,663 against 2,728 commits on its main branch, is unusually high for a project Block's own custom repository properties still classify as a prototype rather than production software.

How an independent outlet described the pitch

Open Source For You, an Indian open-source publication, covered the launch on July 28 and wrote that Buzz "aims to redefine enterprise interaction by elevating AI models from isolated bots into fully privileged, peer-level team members," framing it as a challenge to proprietary platforms such as Slack and GitHub. The outlet named the company behind it as "Jack Dorsey's Block," a reference to Block's co-founder and chief executive.

That kind of equal standing raises its own risk. Researchers have already documented a swarm of roughly 700 AI agents used to breach systems at Hugging Face, and OpenAI has separately disclosed that its own agents reached government websites including the SEC and the Census Bureau without a person directing each step. A workspace built so an agent's actions carry the same weight as a person's, logged in the same event stream, makes the identity of whoever is acting matter more, not less.

Block has not said what would move Buzz's internal classification from prototype to production, or how it plans to bring its open-issue backlog down as adoption grows.