Nous Research has released Hermes Agent support for Buzz, Block’s open source, self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same channels. Buzz is built on Nostr. Every message is a signed event on a relay you own, and every participant, human or agent, is a keypair. That removes the bot-token model. Agents get their own identity, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail.
Is it deployable, and for whom?
Yes, and both sides are self-hostable today. Buzz is Apache-2.0 with 18.8k stars; Hermes Agent is MIT licensed. Solo developers and small engineering teams can run it through Buzz Desktop with no configuration. Mid-market platform teams are the strongest fit, because the relay sits on Postgres, Redis, and S3/MinIO. Enterprises should scope this as a pilot, since mobile clients and workflow approval gates are still being wired up. Practical applications include incident memory over channel history, branch-as-room code review, agent-drafted release notes, and cron-delivered reports.
Three ways to connect
The integration docs split the work by where Hermes runs.
Under the Buzz Desktop managed runtime, Buzz spawns Hermes locally as a preset harness. Open Settings → Runtimes
and Hermes appears automatically. Discovery resolves the hermes-acp
launcher on your login-shell PATH, which the installer writes to ~/.local/bin
. Inbound is ACP over stdio.
The relay bridge suits a hosted agent identity. Buzz’s buzz-acp
harness bridges a channel to hermes acp
over stdio, reaching the relay by WebSocket. This is a transport integration, not a second install. The spawned subprocess shares the same config, credentials, memory, skills, and state as hermes
on that host.
The native gateway platform is the deepest option. A bundled buzz
plugin makes Buzz a normal Hermes messaging platform beside Telegram and Discord, covering channels, DMs, mention gating, threaded replies, reactions, images, and cron delivery. Hermes keeps its own approvals, memory, and session management. Setup is hermes gateway setup
.
Transport, defaults, and identity
On the gateway path, inbound arrives over a persistent NIP-42-authenticated Nostr WebSocket with dependency-free BIP-340 signing, falling back to CLI polling automatically. Outbound always goes through the buzz
CLI. The transport
setting accepts auto
, websocket
, or poll
, and poll_interval
defaults to 4 seconds.
The recommended defaults ship private. require_mention: true
means the agent answers only when addressed in channels, while DMs always dispatch. allow_all_users: false
restricts access to listed npubs or hex pubkeys. interim_assistant_messages: false
and tool_progress: off
keep the tool log out of the channel. Events are de-duplicated by event id against a per-channel high-water mark, and the agent’s own messages are filtered by pubkey.
Key Takeaways
- Hermes Agent connects to Buzz three ways: Desktop runtime, relay bridge, and native gateway.
- The gateway path keeps Hermes memory, skills, approvals, cron, and sessions intact.
- Inbound uses a NIP-42 Nostr WebSocket, with CLI polling fallback at 4 seconds.
- Defaults are private: mention gating on, allow-list enforced, tool logs suppressed.
- Buzz Desktop auto-approves tool permissions, so keep agents owner-only.
Check out the Integration Docs, the Buzz Adapter Reference, and the GitHub Repo. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter, and don’t forget to join our SubReddit and subscribe to our Newsletter.
Michal Sutter is a data science professional with a Master of Science in Data Science from the University of Padova. With a solid foundation in statistical analysis, machine learning, and data engineering, Michal excels at transforming complex datasets into actionable insights.