EveStudioDocs

Connecting Buzz

Buzz is Block's open-source, agent-native team chat. It's built on a Nostr relay, and its defining idea is that agents are members, not bots: your Eve agent gets its own cryptographic identity, profile, channel memberships, and audit trail — the same surface area as a human teammate. Eve Studio is the first agent tool that can put an Eve agent into a Buzz workspace end to end.

The mental model

Three things make Buzz different from every other channel in Studio:

  • Identity is a keypair. There are no bot tokens. Studio generates a Nostr keypair for the agent; the public half (the npub… string) is the agent's identity. The workspace owner admits that identity as a member — and can rename, audit, or remove it any time, like any member.
  • Outbound is serverless. When the deployed agent replies, it signs a Buzz message with its own key and submits it straight to the relay over HTTPS. No middleman — messages are attributable to the agent forever.
  • Inbound needs a listener. Hosted Buzz relays (*.communities.buzz.xyz) don't yet push events out to external services, so Studio ships a small bridge that watches the relay and forwards DMs and @mentions to your deployed agent's /inbound route. The bridge never generates a word — the deployed agent is always the brain. Self-hosted relays with workflow webhooks enabled can skip the bridge entirely.

Direction summary:

  • Receiving. Someone DMs the agent, or @mentions it in a channel it's a member of. The bridge forwards the message; the agent replies into the same conversation, with per-conversation context.
  • Sending proactively. Schedules and tools can post using the channel's target — a Buzz channel UUID (a DM conversation is also a channel UUID under the hood).

Finding your relay URL

The wizard's first real question is the relay URL — the address of your workspace's Buzz relay:

  • Hosted Buzz — your workspace lives at a subdomain of communities.buzz.xyz, so the relay URL is wss://<workspace>.communities.buzz.xyz. The <workspace> part is the community name you signed up with — it's the domain you see in workspace invite links, and workspace admins can read the full URL in the Buzz desktop app's community settings.
  • Self-hosted — the URL of your buzz-relay deployment, e.g. wss://buzz.yourteam.com. If you run the relay, you know this one.

Either wss:// or https:// works — Studio normalizes it.

The guided setup

Integrations → Channels → the Buzz card → Set up. Six steps.

1. How it works

The explainer — the member model and the bridge, honestly stated.

2. Identity

Paste the relay URL and hit Generate identity. Studio creates the keypair (the private key stays in Studio's main process — it never touches the renderer or your repo) and shows the agent's npub….

Copy it, open your Buzz app, and add that member to the workspace (workspace → invite / add member). Then click Verify membership — Studio probes the relay with the agent's own key and flips green when the admission is live.

Admission ≠ channel membership. Right after admitting, the agent is a member of zero channels — that's normal. It joins conversations when someone DMs it or adds it to a channel.

3. Profile

Display name, bio, and an avatar image. Studio uploads the avatar to the relay's media store and publishes the agent's profile — so it shows up in the member list fully dressed before it ever speaks. The display name also matters functionally: @DisplayName mentions are how the agent gets summoned in channels.

You can edit all of this later without re-running the wizard — the configured Buzz row has a Profile button.

4. Wire

One click writes everything the deployed agent needs:

  • BUZZ_RELAY_URL, BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY, BUZZ_WEBHOOK_SECRET, BUZZ_AGENT_NAME → Vercel env (all environments)
  • agent/channels/buzz.ts — the channel file (outbound posting + the secret-gated /inbound route)
  • nostr-tools added to the agent's dependencies

5. Bridge

The inbound listener. Studio prefills the target from your production deployment (https://<agent>.vercel.app/inbound) and offers two modes:

  • Run while Studio is open — good for testing.
  • Install background bridge — a macOS LaunchAgent that starts at login and keeps listening with Studio closed. This is the production mode: as long as the agent is deployed, it hears and answers.

Studio also detects your Vercel Deployment Protection bypass secret automatically so the bridge can reach the deployed route.

If you haven't deployed yet, the target will be empty — skip ahead, deploy, then come back and start the bridge.

6. Ship

Deploy, then DM the agent in Buzz.

Verifying it works

  1. The agent shows online in the member list (the bridge heartbeats presence).
  2. DM it. Within ~5–10 seconds the deployed agent replies in the DM.
  3. @mention it in a channel it's a member of — same deal, reply in-channel.
  4. The Channels list in Studio shows connected to this agent (member + bridge running).

Gotchas

  • Messages sent before the bridge started won't be replayed. By design — no stale-reply storms. Send a fresh message after the bridge is up.
  • "Not admitted yet" right after adding the member usually means the admission hasn't been done in the right workspace — the relay URL and the workspace you added the member to must match.
  • Deployment Protection. If your Vercel project has SSO protection (the default for previews), the bridge needs the protection-bypass secret. Studio fills it automatically when your Vercel CLI is logged in; check the bridge log if forwards return 401.
  • Bridge log. ~/Library/Application Support/eve-studio/buzz-bridge/<agent>.log shows connections and every forward with its HTTP status. First stop for any "it's not answering."
  • The agent replies from the deployed brain only. Local dev is never reachable from Buzz — deploy to test, like Slack and Telegram.

Removing it

Delete the channel row in Studio (removes channels/buzz.ts; redeploy to take effect), uninstall the background bridge from the Bridge step, and remove the member in your Buzz app. The identity can't post once its membership is revoked.