Fred Lackey

Why I Love Buzz

Every so often a piece of software comes along that feels less like a tool and more like a statement about where the industry is headed. For me, right now, that is Buzz, the open source “hive mind communication platform” from Block, Inc.

Buzz is a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms. Not bots bolted onto a chat app, but agents as genuine teammates: their own keys, their own channel memberships, their own audit trail. Under the hood it is a Nostr relay where every message, reaction, code review, workflow step, and git event is a signed event in one log, whether the author is a person or a process. On top of that foundation, it feels like a team workspace with taste.

I have spent four decades building software, and much of the last several years helping organizations adopt AI without losing sight of the people who depend on it. Buzz is the first collaboration platform I have used that treats that human-and-agent partnership as the starting premise rather than an afterthought. Jack Dorsey and the folks at Block did not just ship another AI-adjacent developer tool; they shipped an opinion about how teams should work, on a relay you own. I admire that enormously, and I want to see it succeed.

This page exists for one reason: I believe in this product, I want more people using it, and I wanted to contribute something meaningful back to the community that built it.

The Missing Runtime: AWS Kiro

Buzz already speaks to several coding-agent harnesses out of the box, including Goose, Claude Code, and Codex. But there is a fast-growing runtime it did not yet support: Kiro CLI, the agentic developer tool from AWS.

This is not a hypothetical need. I work with companies where Kiro is the only approved provider for AI agent workloads. Their security and procurement teams have vetted it, their credentials and governance flow through it, and no other harness is permitted on their resources. For those organizations, Buzz without Kiro support is not a product with a missing feature; it is a product they cannot adopt at all.

That struck me as a solvable problem, and exactly the kind of contribution an open source community hopes for: someone with a real-world need, the engineering background to address it properly, and the motivation to do it in the upstream project’s own idiom rather than as a one-off hack.

Making Kiro a First-Class Citizen

I submitted pull request #2914 to block/buzz: feat(agents): add Kiro CLI ACP runtime. The goal was simple to state and demanding to do well: make Kiro behave exactly like the runtimes Buzz already ships, with no translation adapter and no special cases.

• Adds a catalog-owned kiro runtime that resolves the locally installed Kiro CLI and launches it through Kiro’s native ACP interface (kiro-cli acp), with no adapter layer in between
• Makes Kiro discoverable and selectable during onboarding, right alongside Claude Code and Codex, complete with the official Kiro icon and catalog-driven setup, authentication, model, and MCP metadata
• Respects Kiro’s own authentication: Buzz never touches a Kiro model API or bundles Kiro credentials; the Kiro CLI continues to own its login state, probed read-only and surfaced cleanly in the Buzz UI
• Ships with runtime, frontend, onboarding, and Playwright test coverage, a full green CI run, and updated architecture, setup, testing, and vision documentation

Scope note, in the interest of honesty: the integration uses Kiro’s default, V2-compatible ACP entry point. Kiro’s V3 agent engine is intentionally out of scope for this first pass. Existing non-Kiro runtime behavior is unchanged.

A Signed Preview for Apple Silicon

Upstream review takes time, as it should. But the organizations that need this cannot evaluate a pull request, and asking every curious Mac user to build Buzz from source is a big ask. So while #2914 works through review, I publish Buzz Kiro Preview: a signed and notarized macOS build of Buzz with the Kiro integration included.

To Block, and to the Buzz Community

Consider me a friend of this project. I am not affiliated with Block or AWS; I am a practitioner who thinks Buzz got the big things right and wants to help it reach the organizations that need it most, including the ones whose approved path to AI runs exclusively through Kiro.

To the Buzz maintainers: thank you for building this, and for keeping it Apache 2.0 and self-hostable. The pull request is yours to shape; I am happy to revise, extend, or rework it however best serves the project. To everyone else: try Buzz, try the preview, and if the Kiro integration matters to you or your organization, say so on the PR. Open source moves on demonstrated demand.

And if you would like to talk about Buzz, Kiro, or secure AI adoption in general, I would love to hear from you.