I Forked Jack Dorsey's Buzz to Stop Context Switching While Working With AI Agents

The thing that was slowing me down was not the model. It was the app switch.

I would be working in Buzz, the open-source agent app from Block, and the agent would finish something and hand me a local markdown path. Great. Except there was no way to click it. So I would open Obsidian to read it. Or open a browser and split my screen just to look at an artifact it had built. Every single time.

I found that very, very annoying. And I have a squirrel brain, so when I have to open up another app, especially a browser, I might get sidetracked. One markdown file turns into twenty minutes I do not get back.

So I asked myself a different question than "how do I fix this file link." I asked: how could I just spend more time in Buzz? How could I spend 90 minute focused sessions in Buzz actually working on something?

That question is what produced the fork.

Meet Buzz Bench

Buzz Bench is my private fork of Buzz. I do not plan on releasing it. It is my belief that Jack and team will eventually incorporate a lot of these features that I built out for myself, and honestly that is the point. The fork is not a competing product. It is a working spec.

I prompted the whole thing on a live stream to start the flow. And I deliberately kept everything in one thread the entire time, just to see how many replies it would take, how much back and forth it would take to get to a good point.

At the time of recording that thread was at 381 replies. Still going. It is pretty amazing.

Here is what came out of it.

1. Know which thread you are actually in

Small one, huge daily payoff.

When you have a stack of 10 threads open and one of them is active, there is no clear indicator of which one you are looking at. Especially when you have been tabbing out to a browser and back. I would have thought it would be in the title bar. It was not.

So I added a highlight on the active thread. That is the whole feature. It fixed something that irritated me every single day.

2. Activity that does not eat your thread

The default Buzz app has an Activity tab that replaces the thread you are in. So to see what is happening on the back end, you lose your place.

In Buzz Bench, activity renders off to the right instead. Nothing gets replaced. When I want to see what is happening under the hood, I look right, and my conversation is still sitting there. It beats reading the alternating activity line at the bottom of the screen.

3. Clickable local paths, opened in a side pane

This is the one that started everything.

As you work with your agents, they link you local paths, but there is no way to click on them. Now any markdown file the agent links opens off to the right, in the bench. HTML artifacts do the same. PDFs open too, which was a fun little bonus.

The pane keeps tabs open unless you close them, so you can stack a few reference files and keep working. I do still need to work on the magnification for HTML docs. It is not finished, and I am not going to pretend it is.

4. An embedded browser for localhost and everything else

I have been building a Mac OS app as another experiment. During that build, the agent kept linking me to localhost, but it would not give us an actual link to click on. Same problem as the markdown files, different flavor.

So I built an embedded browser. It handles the case where you are building something locally hosted and want to see it immediately. It also handles anything else you would normally leave the app for. Go to the Buzz website. Or log into X, prep a social post, and copy it straight across without opening a separate browser. That is the real marketing use case for me.

Side note from the demo: there was a live cursor bug in the Mac OS app while I was recording. I left it in. That is what building in public actually looks like.

5. A splittable terminal I barely use

I added a terminal, and you can split it if you want to work out of the terminal or whatever harness for whatever reason.

Honest admission: I personally do not use this much. It was one of those things where I vibe coded the prompt and Jack and Fizz built it out for me. When the marginal cost of a feature is one prompt, "I might want this someday" is a good enough reason to ship it.

The result: four to six hours a day in one window

That is where I have landed. I am now spending four to six hours of my day in Buzz. It is awesome.

Not because the app got more powerful. Because it stopped ejecting me.

The agent teams

Quick look at how the work is organized. I still run the default team. Then I built out a marketing team: Dexter is my LinkedIn guy, Xavier is my X guy. Spicy and Sour are two agents I recently added that will be part of another team.

The pattern that works for me is one agent per platform, named, with a defined lane. Not one generalist trying to be fluent in everything.

What to steal from this

You probably do not need to fork anything. But the method transfers:

• Track what pulls you out of your primary tool. Every app switch is a feature request you have not written down yet.
• Pick your target session length first. I picked 90 minutes, and that decided what had to live inside the app.
• Make agent-produced paths and localhost URLs clickable. It is the highest-frequency friction in agentic workflows.
• Open files in a side pane with persistent tabs. Do not replace the conversation you are working in.
• Show which thread is active when you keep several open.
• Keep an iterative build in one thread so you can see the true back and forth cost of what you are making.
• Fork instead of filing a feature request. A working fork is a spec a maintainer can actually read.

Thank you to Block

I want to say this plainly. Thank you to Block. Thank you to Jack and team for releasing this.

Some of the best tools out there, and applications for that matter, are things that are built for yourself. Then you realize, wow, this is something amazing, the public could benefit from it, and you open source it. That cycle is the only reason any of this was possible for me. Amazing.

This was a different kind of video than my usual model demos and builds. I just wanted to show what I built and how I am using it. More Buzz content is coming, so follow along so you do not miss an episode.

Watch the full walkthrough on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgXXwQI4hYU