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The Startup Ideas Podcast

Jack Dorsey's Buzz: The New Hermes Agent?

July 28 · 38 min
0:00-38:44

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I sit down with Vinny for a live tour of Buzz, an open source, agent-native chat app from Block built on an open protocol. Vinny makes the case that openness is the real story here: agents arrive as first-class teammates, the harness underneath each agent swaps freely between Claude Code, Codex, Goose, and open code, and your entire chat context travels with you through every swap. He demos real output, including a CRM app built with the Wasp full stack framework and deployed to Railway, plus a tweet leaderboard that pipes daily stats back into a channel through a public API. I press him for the honest state of the software and for the setup advice he actually uses day to day. By the end I share where I land on Buzz versus Slack, and why I think anyone building right now gains from putting their hands on tools like this.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

02:57 – Agents as First-Class Team Members

03:49 – Swappable Harnesses Under Any Agent

06:55 – Audio Huddles With Agents

08:34 – Git, Feature Branches, and Parallel Worktrees

11:20 – Building a CRM App with Buzz and Agents

13:43 – Why This Matters

18:13 – Best way to engage with your Agents

23:53 – Shared Compute and Local Models

25:42 – Model Choice, Data Ownership, and Lock-In

27:36 – Context as the Foundation

29:39 – Setting Up Agents

31:21 – Skills and Speed

33:03 – Who Should Try Buzz Today

34:36 – My Take: Live in the Future

38:10– Closing Thoughts

Key Points

  • Buzz treats agents as members of your team, so one shared chat becomes the context layer for humans and agents together.
  • The harness under any agent swaps freely, and every chat, project, and decision comes along for the ride.
  • Globally installed agent skills stay available inside Buzz, so an existing Claude Code setup carries straight over.
  • Agents branch, work in parallel worktrees, push to Git hosting on your own relay, and ship live apps end to end.
  • Shared compute lets a small team run one local model on one machine and use it from many computers.
  • Buzz sits in early preview today, which makes it a strong fit for solopreneurs and small teams iterating fast.

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