Jack Dorsey's Buzz: The New Hermes Agent?

0:00Jack Dorsey just launched Buzz and it's gone completely viral. Yes, it's the same Jack Dorsey who co-founded Twitter, who co-founded Block. This guy is building what people are calling a Slack killer. Now, why does this matter for you? Well, it's being called a Slack killer because it's almost like this agentic version of Slack. It's a way to have conversations with your teammates except their agents. It's a way for you to huddle agents. It's a way for you to have software being built on the fly via agents. So in this episode, we're going to break down it so clearly for you so that you understand what it is, why you should use it, and what are the best tips and tricks to use Buzz.

0:44My take on this whole thing is it's a glimpse into the future of work. I can't wait to see what you think about it. And by the end of the episode, you'll understand if it's for you, why you should use it, how you should use it. Enjoy the episode.

0:58Vinny:The startup I just podcast. It's skipping time, baby. What's up, Vinny? I saw your tweet. Jack Dorsey retweeted it. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? They're going to learn how to use Buzz. Mostly, I think it's like the sweet spot for Buzz right now is, I think, solopreneurs, small teams. they're going to learn how to use it to like kind of brainstorm keep everything in context between their agents and just build products, build solutions, ideate and like yeah, use it to get stuff out there quicker and be more productive. Cool, okay so what I hope to get from this is basically understand what buzz is, understand why it matters, understand some best practices on how I can use it to actually use agents to do things for me.

2:00By the end of this episode, I want to understand if I should actually use this thing. Or should I just basically continue using Slack? That's what I hope to get out of this. Do you think you could commit to that? Also, while you're going through it, just share the best practices that haven't been shared anywhere so that we've got a little edge on people. Do you think you can do that? Yeah, I think so. I just want to start off by saying like, I think the Slack killer, you know, it's a good line that it's a Slack killer. But I think the real like the real selling point for me for with Buzz, like from the beginning is just the the openness of it.

2:41So do we want to start there? Just like what I mean by open and and what kind of like what that allows, like the power, how powerful the openness feature of Buzz is? Yeah, I mean, sell me on Buzz. Like, why? Okay, okay. Yeah. So first off, it's Slack with agents inside and a lot of people. Like, it's kind of like Slack. You got agents inside. So Slack allows you to do that by adding an integration. But in Buzz, they're like first-class citizens, right? So they're members of your team. You don't think of them as like add-ons or just kind of a side feature. They're an integral part of the app. They are part of your team.

3:24Think about it that way. So I like to keep things simple. And I just started using this not too long ago. I mean, it's only been out for a little while. I just discovered it. And these are basically what you see here are the default agents you get when you start. But under the surface, there's a really powerful thing, which is you can edit and add agents. And when you give agent instructions, that's just basically like a system prompt. The really cool thing underneath is the harness. So we're all probably using codex, cloud code, maybe something like open code to do our coding work, build products, whatever, be more productive.

4:05The great thing here is that your agent harness is swappable under any agent. So I can go under here and say, you know, I want to use cloud code. I want to use codex. I want to use Goose and like for me already that point there was like okay this is very cool and the reason why this is so cool is because I mean if any of you all your listeners probably follow this stuff AI moves at like a breakneck pace right so today it's this model the next day it's the other model and sometimes I don't know about you but personally I'm like I get model fatigue where I'm just like, gosh, you know, I just switched over to this.

4:48I just got used to this model. Like I don't even want to hear the good things about model X because I'm still over here using model Y. But the cool thing about this is that this is a layer on top of that and you can just switch. And the best part is, is that your agent, you don't lose anything in that switching process. You can change the harness under your agent and all the context that's in your chats. So everything you've been chatting about with this agent, like all the stuff you're trying out, the apps you're building, that all that all that context comes with to that new harness to that new model.

5:20So first off, that's something I think is really cool about Buzz. That's a that's that's a huge deal, because I feel like a lot of us are ping ponging between different models and harnesses and stuff like that. And it's tiresome, you know, when you're when you're starting from scratch um it does feel like and then i need to understand okay what is sol good at too you know like and what are the contexts for this particular model to get the most out of it so i think the fact that this is built natively into the product um that you can go and switch just like i like that because it's thinking about how people are working in today's day and age and they're acknowledging it and they're like we understand that yes there's going to be new models all the time and you might want to be switching but you probably don't want to spend a lot of time adding context figuring out things because you're busy trying to run a startup trying to make money trying to be productive yep yep exactly and you can take all your stuff with you you know like um if you're if you've built all these skills and skill files and folders and stuff As long as they're in the global directory, if they're accessible globally and they're not project specific, Buzz can access them.

6:41So you can install agent skills like normal. Then you can change harnesses, change models, and your agents in the chat have access to all of them. So I think that's really cool. I'm really happy about that. Okay, what else do we need to know? We've got audio huddles with agent. So that allows you to have like an audio chat with your agents and they'll be in the chat and they'll respond to you. And so you can have a voice call with someone else, bring an agent in and communicate. And they also get the context of your of your whole chat in the audio huddle. So that's pretty cool. I haven't tried that out yet, though.

7:19So I have seen some good videos on YouTube that run through it and show you how to do it. What's cool about huddling agents or an agent, I tweeted about this. I feel like what I'm missing from building in the AI age is I feel like I'm asking my agents to do things. Maybe I'm using Whisperflow or even just typing it. And it feels very much like back and forth, back and forth. What's cool about a huddle is it's live. and the way my brain works when I'm being creative is I need live interaction in order to really extract what's going on in my brain. I think there's probably a lot of people like me like that so it's cool that that's a feature.

8:07My dream, and I tweeted this, my dream is eventually to have the ability to FaceTime agents. And that to me is the holy grail of the future of work. But cool that you can see that Buzz is scratching the surface here. Is it good or if it's not good? We'll have to test it. People in the comment section, please let us know. But it's interesting that that feature exists. What's another feature that you're excited about? I mean, well, right under the surface, you've got these agents and you probably want them to do work. So they're integrating. They have Git pretty tightly integrated into it. And your agents will actually, you know, they're doing coding.

8:54They can create projects. They'll create feature branches and they work in parallel work trees. So they're not actually messing with stuff that's locally on your computer. They'll make a work tree, a copy, and they can work there. So they can do things in parallel. So you could, for example, you know, you're talking to your teammate about a UI, the design of your product or your web page or something. And you can just, you know, tell the agent, like, spin up three different versions of landing pages based on the ideas that you guys had in the chat. Right. And they've just added this projects view.

9:30So if you go into settings here, there are experiments. You can turn on workflows and projects, for example. And then you'll see that here. And this is basically like, you know, your apps that you're coding on with your agents and working on with your agents. And another interesting thing is that you can integrate with GitHub. But under the surface, they have their own hosted Git hosting. So you can push to remote repositories that are actually on your relay. So that's probably a more technical thing, but Buzz works on relays. So these are like servers that you host or that get hosted for you by Buzz, by Block.

10:19And then they'll actually push that code to the remote repositories on your relay. So the relay is where all your information, all your chats, everything, that's where all that stuff is happening and where it's stored and where it's getting sent and pushed to the other people chatting with you and the agents chatting with you. So I can see in the future that they're trying to take on more than just Slack here. They're trying to take on GitHub as well. So that's pretty crazy. Cool, and I think for the non-technical audience, I feel like a lot of my non-technical friends are actually starting to use GitHub now in the AI age.

10:57I don't know if you've noticed this. No, I'm just kind of in the bubble. Mostly in the nerd bubble. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like five years ago, if you were non-technical, 10 years ago, if you were non-technical, you barely knew what GitHub was. The word repo, you're like, are you repossessing my car? But I think now in an AI age where we're kind of all technical in some way, something like this makes a lot of sense to be built natively. Yeah. And the interesting thing is you don't really have to know that much about it. You don't really have to even consider it because your agents will just kind of take care of stuff for you.

11:44Like I was doing stuff here where I was asking, you know, pull up a simple CRM app and, you know, I told it, here's the chat right here. Spin up a simple CRM app using the Wasp full stack framework and deploy it to Railway for me. So, you know, there's some technical knowledge there. You know, I'm asking for a specific framework, a specific hosting provider, but it'll do that. and even gets stuff, pushes it to these remote repositories, deploys it live on the web and even sends you screenshots. So it's like, oh, here's your CRM. Here's your, that I just made. And that's all before I even checked out what it was even doing.

12:27So it just, it did it for me, gave me the links, gave me a little preview of it. And yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. That's insane. Yeah, there's a lot of, I feel like they've baked in a lot of workflows and a lot of just like prompts into these agents so that these agents kind of can work end to end and really get tasks done. I think that's the idea. Yeah, that's insane. Like if you think about it, like we're kind of like glossing over it, but like look what you built. Yeah. And it's like, it's live on the internet, right? Already. So the nice thing is, you know, I already had a railway account.

13:09I know a little bit about working with full stack apps, but I didn't really tell it much. I just said, you can see the chat, put this online. So now I have a fully functioning CRM dashboard that I can share with team members. And then we can, the cool thing is then what you would do is you'd add them to this chat here. And you start talking about what features are missing, what things you don't like. and then you guys have a conversation with your teammates and you come to a conclusion and you just tell your agents to go ahead and start working on it and they'll do it. So why this is a big deal is if you think about it you're able to create software on the fly essentially automated that's high quality that could be deployed that you can manage in a view that is clear.

14:01If you think about your business, let's say you have an agency business, proposals is the lifeblood of your business in a lot of ways. And imagine that you can create proposals based on people's data. Maybe you're pitching the NFL and you could put in the context of the pitch meeting notes, let's say, from granola or something else. It ingests it and then on the fly you have these agents based on that create proposals that are unique to those clients. And it's vibe coded or it's using agents to actually create them. There's so many ways that you can use this interface to think about, okay, I have context over here.

14:53This is how it comes in. And then here's how it's going to get spin up on the internet or through an asset that is built within code. And then here's how you're going to view it. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. In one of the videos I made that I posted on Twitter, that was what I was going through. So I was taking more of like a marketing angle and I built a tweet leaderboard for Twitter. So like my team, like how much we're tweeting, how good, what are what are our top tweets, all that stuff. All that information was being collected in this in this app, this full stack app. And then I was like, oh, well, instead of just building it with Buzz, why don't I get Buzz to also access the app, get that information, then we can get like, you know, daily reviews here, daily digests.

15:47And we can also like kind of brainstorm on what's working in our Twitter strategy for marketing, what's not working, get it to find like links between the popular tweets and, you know, brainstorm, come up with new stuff. So that's exactly what I did. I had it. I told it, let's build a publicly facing API and then let's build a workflow. So I just tell it daily, you know, check that API and give me the numbers back. And then the awesome thing is that's what you're seeing right here in this tweet stats for app from app. it's getting the stuff from that dashboard through an externally facing API and putting it here into this channel and then I can reply to it and be like okay Fizz which is one of the agents like Fizz let me know what's the the common thread between my successful tweets this this last seven days because it also sends those over the API so if I understood you correctly I think you're talking about kind of these workflows where you're like this circular stuff where you're giving information in, getting it out through apps, and it's all going into the context of your agents and stuff like that.

16:58Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm interested in this because this is like the quote unquote boring stuff that every business has that if you can figure out how to have some unfair advantage here, it's what separates a good business from a bad business. mm-hmm yeah and and that's the thing i really like is that this openness of buzz like it allows this kind of these kind of integrations to to happen very easily so with slack like you would have to you know to get all this kind of stuff up and running you'd have to get api tokens create an app on their platform all their stuff is proprietary you have to like learn how the structure of things i mean with agents it's easier but here because it's built on these open protocols, like you can get stuff like this running really easily.

17:48And then you have this just like crazy context engine that just can help you do work. Like if I wanted to, I could ask Fizz right now, you know, like connect up the app or, you know, connect yourself to the X API and make it available so that we can start tweeting from Buzz. Like that wouldn't be that hard. We could probably do that in 15 minutes, you know? Crazies. One thing that I really like about this kind of, you know, this close, we were talking about this closed circle of like context that I'm getting back from my app. So that tweet dashboard app is that like, here, it sends me the tweets every day and the stats, like the top tweets and my stats and impressions.

18:31And I can just ask the agent, like um let's make sure i'm replying there and i'll just say like uh what can like what is the common thread between my top tweets and um sometimes like i used to do this with in a session with um claude code or chat gpt where i'd be like literally you know exporting tweet data or copying pasting tweet data and putting it into chat gpt on the on the um desk or on the uh browse in the browser you know getting information chat about it and pulling it back but like this is so cool because it's pulling the the it's getting the information from the x api it's in the context window of the agents here i can chat about it here and then um you know we're we can chat with colleagues about like what you know what are some more tweets we want to push out what's a different marketing angle we could take and um uh that's what i really like about this uh here and you can see there is the um agent working so what's actually going on in the background that's nice if you're um if you're used to looking at this kind of stuff in a terminal you actually see the tool calls that that it's uh um the tools that it's calling and uh think or here it is down here like what is happening so um it's getting information from the channels uh checking for newer stats and things like that gets the results um and so it's all like kind of under the curtain stuff but um we should get a response back soon and is there is there any like tips around how you is best to talk to them like i see here is you just wrote a short and concise question but But how should people think about the best way to talk to some of these agents?

20:31I mean, they're pretty good at pulling out the intent behind your questions these days. So just have a conversation with them like you would like a normal person. So I don't think I at least don't have any special approach there. I kind of just say, you know, this is probably nicer than what I would normally type. Usually I got typos in there and stuff. I'm like, give me the sauce, you know? And they're usually pretty good at that because they have all this context. So I'm usually pretty straightforward and concise with the questions and the stuff, the prompts I give. Reported back. So it's showing what I did.

21:10I tried Jack's Buzz. I deployed OpenSaaS to OpenShip, my first time successfully self-hosting. um so it's like um it's showing that um you know i'm doing these things as a beginner and i'm reporting back on what i learned and those are the things that are doing well so it worked are my top two top two tweets got over a million impressions uh but this sucked theme uh got a They were the bottom half, and they got a collective 88 ,000. So novelty gets you reach. Friction gets you engagement. So there's some actually really good advice there. And that's kind of the power of using it here and having all of it in Buzz is that it makes stuff like this easy and illuminating.

22:00So that's really cool. I like that. By the way, I saw one of the pieces of feedback is nobody is mentioning that Buzz has a backdoor for Bitcoin native payments. What does that mean? So Buzz, we were talking about open protocol. So I kind of glossed over this. It's built on Noster. And Noster is the name of the open protocol that Buzz is built on. And I personally believe, because if you know Jack Dorsey, he's a big fan of Bitcoin. Noster has tightly coupled with Bitcoin Lightning, which is a very fast and like almost fee-less way to pay and transfer Bitcoin. And my guess here is that because it's built on Noster, Noster's open, you'll be able to integrate Bitcoin Lightning payments into Buzz.

22:56and you'll either be able to pay, agents will be able to pay for compute, this shared compute IDO that we talked about or that's in there in the settings. You'll be, agents will be able to pay for work and compute or people will be able to pay other people, tip other people for tasks they get done. So like I can honestly imagine a big open community of let's say, I don't know why I keep gravitating towards graphic designers, but like I say designers and you need a really cool logo and AI Gen, Image Gen isn't really doing it for you. And you ask some people to spit out some ideas and some random person in some graphic design community on Buzz gives you an awesome logo and you just tip them.

23:41Thank you for that idea. And then you go ahead and keep working. And yeah, we'll see. It's not integrated at the moment, but I think it will come. Very cool. Awesome. so what else do people need to know about buzz um so let's see um you mentioned that shared compute um uh idea and i think that's that goes back into like the openness of buzz and that's uh really cool and that was something that really surprised me too so um why don't we just uh talk about that for a minute so we've got this uh compute um uh setting here and you can turn it on and it will automatically suggest some local LLM, some local model, AI models that you can download on your laptop or on your computer and you can literally share them with the other members of your team.

24:34So let's say that you are just starting out, you're a college student and you wanna start building a business, you've got this awesome idea, you don't have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of help and you don't have, you know, like the money to buy one of these Max Pro plans, whatever they're called, with like unlimited token budget. So you could get together with some friends, you know, buy a decent sized laptop or a Mac Studio or something, or maybe even like a beefy Mac Mini. You put this on, you share compute, and all of you can use this one model running from one machine, even though you're chatting from different laptops, from different computers, whatever.

25:16So that's just a very simple example. But you can see how they're paving the road here for real openness in model choice and being able to really harness the power of these open source and local models that are always getting stronger and starting to compete with the frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI. So I think that's really cool. And why do you think that even this is worth playing with? You know, why is this really important? Why is local important in the grand scheme of the future of work? I mean, model choice is important depending on what you want to do. And, you know, it's the same idea where Slack is the controller of your data.

26:08And that data is very valuable. you're sitting here you know spending i mean this stuff makes work a lot easier but you still have these really cool ideas you're iterating on these ideas um you're putting stuff out there that you work pretty hard on and that you think a lot about and then to have like just one company control all that data basically um like slack for example have the whole all your data in that sessions and if you're tired of slack and want to move to something else it's really hard or it might not even be possible to take all that data with you to some other platform. So you just stay there and you're stuck with them.

26:45It's the same thing for models. You know, you see people talking about why, you know, there are, who knows, today it costs$200 a month for an unlimited plan. Tomorrow it might be$2 ,000. We don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. And the future, you know, having choice in the future is very important for the integrity, for the sustainability of any business because that's your data. That's what you want to be able to do with it. I don't know. Some of these models have restrictions on what you're even able to ask them. So governments have top-down mandates on what they're allowed to do with the models or not.

27:23So we saw models get pulled back after people started using them for a couple of days. So you're building your businesses on top of these tools. You should have flexibility and freedom and control of these tools, basically. Yeah, and I think the big insight of all of this is a lot of us haven't realized how much of a content hub Slack and products like that have become to us. And we're learning that if you want to get the best out of any of these models, you need to have the most amount of context possible. So what's really cool about Buzz is it's basically like, okay, we recognize that this is your context foundation and we're going to go help you pivot into a bunch of directions.

28:14You want to have these projects that are integrated to GitHub, we can go do that. If you want to do local stuff and do shared compute, we can help you do that. you know etc etc you want to huddle an agent we can help you do that but it you know what's so cool about it is whatever you decide to do the context is at the core of it yep yep exactly and that's what i like about it that's what i think is really cool is that um i think they really hit on something here so you know i think um we'll see uh it could go like i saw people commenting open claw you know nobody's talking about open claw anymore um open claw was a real wow moment and like okay we can get these agents to do a lot of productive work for us um but i have the feeling that it was missing something and this shared context because we were working in teams we're working with other people um teams might even just mean your other agents right like you just you you you're going to have conversations whether it's with one agent or another but But now you have the ability to expand that, like your team set, expand your global context window, so to speak, and then make it globally available to everyone in your team, including the agents.

29:37So yeah, I think it's super cool. Around setting up and managing your agents, is there any sauce here? Is there anything people need to know besides what you've already shared? I wouldn't say so. I've seen, it depends on how deep in the weeds you like to go. My honest opinion would be, you probably don't need to do that much. All I did, the first thing I did was just, I wanted one that's Fable. I'm using specifically or exclusively, I'm using Claude Code as the harness under here. But they have adapters, so you can adapt, you know, you can even adapt OpenClaw or Hermes or OpenClaw, or I'm sorry, OpenCode or Goose.

30:20So like any of these harnesses can be added under the surface here, under the hood. But the first thing I did was I just pinned them to models. So Fizz is a Fable model and Honey is Sonnet because there's just certain tasks that I don't need to use the power of Fable and burn through tokens so fast. So that would be like my main piece of advice. Besides that, just start playing around. I made this chief agent officer. So like if I do start to create more agents with more specific kind of instructions and system prompts, then I might delegate the delegation to Mr. Chief Agent Officer here and be like, OK, I have this task.

31:02Who's the best for it? Because, you know, you might have a copywriter, you might have a brainstormer, you might have a code reviewer, things like that. And you might forget who they are, or I don't know, you just get an agent to kind of delegate. So that would be pretty much my only advice on that side there. Cool. Anything else you want to show? People were asking in Twitter about skills. And I think I mentioned it already, but like all the stuff under the surface that you're used to using, if you use Cloud Code or something, that's all available as long as it's to Buzz, your Buzz agents, as long as it's globally installed.

31:37So skills and things like that. Yeah, they can use and they can take advantage of. So you don't lose that stuff. So that's also very nice. And I would say that like this is beta software. It's like it might even be alpha. I'm not sure. It's like early preview software. So some things don't work that great. I was trying to create workflows and, you know, like set up recurring tasks and things like that. And they weren't really landing great. that was one thing I noticed another thing I noticed was things can be kind of slow if you're used to it being like working directly in cloud code or in a codex it seems to be a bit faster there and I think it's because it's communicating with your your server your relay and communicating back and because of that I think it's at the point now where it's like really good for like I said, solopreneurs, small teams, iterating on small software or small ideas.