Jack Dorsey’s Buzz and the Real Value of Open Source
Jack Dorsey’s company Block launched Buzz this week — a group chat platform aimed squarely at Slack and GitHub, designed for a specific moment: teams where AI agents now do meaningful chunks of the work, and humans need to collaborate with those agents inside the same conversation rather than across five disconnected tools. Dorsey describes it as model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. It’s not the only entrant — Paradigm’s CTO open-sourced a similar tool, Centaur, a couple months earlier, aimed at running “virtual employee” agents inside or alongside Slack.
Buzz itself is upfront that it’s in early stages, and TechCrunch’s own coverage doesn’t recommend migrating a team over yet. So the interesting part isn’t “is Buzz the new Slack.” It’s the design choice underneath it: open source, by default, for a workflow tool.
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That choice matters more as AI agents get baked into everyday tools. A closed platform’s roadmap moves at the vendor’s pace, and every team’s agent workflow looks slightly different — coding agents, research agents, ops agents, all with different needs. An open-source base means a team isn’t stuck waiting for a feature request to get prioritized; they can build the missing piece themselves.
I lean toward open-source-friendly stacks in client builds for the same reason, at a much smaller scale. It’s not about avoiding license costs. It’s about not being blocked by someone else’s release schedule when a client’s specific workflow doesn’t fit the default path.
As agentic tools multiply, the tool that wins for a given team probably isn’t the most feature-complete one out of the box. It’s the one flexible enough to be reshaped into what that team actually needs.
