Jack Dorsey Just Killed Slack — His New Free App Lets AI Agents Work Beside You Like Real Teammates
I have to be honest — when I saw the news this morning, I literally stopped scrolling. Jack Dorsey just launched something that could genuinely shake up how every tech team works, and it is completely free. Say hello to Buzz.
What Exactly Is Buzz?
On July 22, 2026, Jack Dorsey's company Block officially launched Buzz, a free, open-source platform that combines team chat, code repositories, and automated workflows — all in one place. Think of it as Slack and GitHub had a baby, and that baby was raised by AI. Dorsey himself described it as "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes."
But here's what makes Buzz genuinely different from everything else out there: AI agents get treated like real team members. In Buzz, every agent gets its own cryptographic identity, its own channel memberships, and its own audit trail. You add an agent to a channel the exact same way you add a coworker. Once it's in, it can open code repositories, send patches, review code, run automated workflows, and pull in whoever needs to see the results.
Built on Nostr — What That Actually Means
Buzz is built on the Nostr protocol, which is a decentralized, open protocol originally popularized in the crypto/Bitcoin world. This is not just a tech detail — it means every user (human or AI agent) gets a cryptographic key pair. Nobody owns the network. No single company can shut it down or hold your data hostage. That is a massive departure from Slack, which is entirely centralized and controlled by Salesforce.
Dorsey called it "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source." It supports agents built on Claude Code, Codex, and Block's own Goose framework. So no matter what AI stack your team uses, Buzz is designed to work with it.
Why This Could Actually Kill Slack
Let me put some numbers in perspective. Slack reportedly has around 32 million daily active users. GitHub has over 100 million registered developers. Both tools are beloved but increasingly expensive — Slack's Pro plan runs $8.75/user/month, and GitHub Teams is another $4/user/month. That's $12.75 per developer, every single month.
Buzz is completely free and open source. The desktop app is available right now for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The code is already up on GitHub for anyone to audit or contribute to.
Yes, Slack has years of integrations and enterprise adoption. But I've seen this story before — a scrappy, free, developer-friendly alternative takes time, then suddenly it's everywhere. Especially when AI agents are involved.
The Bigger Picture: AI Agents Need a Home
Here's the thing nobody is saying loudly enough: the way we work with AI agents right now is a mess. Most teams bolt AI onto existing tools — a Claude bot in Slack here, a Codex integration on GitHub there. There's no unified place where humans and AI agents can genuinely collaborate as peers with the same permissions, visibility, and accountability.
Buzz is trying to solve that from the ground up. Agents have their own identities. Their actions are logged and auditable. They can be added to or removed from channels. This is how AI-native work might actually look in 2026 and beyond.
My Take
I'm genuinely excited about this one. I've been frustrated with the fragmented way my team uses AI tools — bouncing between apps, losing context, copy-pasting outputs from one tool to another. The idea of a single workspace where AI agents and humans work together seamlessly is exactly what I've been waiting for.
Is Buzz going to replace Slack overnight? Probably not. But it doesn't have to. It just has to be good enough for early adopters and developer teams to start switching — and free, open-source, and backed by Jack Dorsey is a pretty strong starting lineup.
I'm downloading it today. I'll report back.
What's your experience? Drop a comment below! Have you tried Buzz yet — or are you staying loyal to Slack? Would you ever add an AI agent to your team chat like a real coworker?
Comments
Post a Comment