SK16 · Supporting knowledge

SUPPORTING KNOWLEDGE · 0016

Start alone, then go multiplayer

Block makes two agent products and describes the pair in four words: start alone, then go multiplayer. The phrase comes from Block's article on designing Berd, published 2026-08-18. Berd is the private workspace on your own computer, where one person works with agents. Buzz is the shared workspace, where people and agents work together in the same rooms, and every message is signed and kept.

The Buzz Guide's Buzz or Berd page carries the one rule: if nobody else needs to see it, add to it, or point back at it later, it belongs in Berd; as soon as one of those becomes true, it belongs in Buzz. The third test catches people: work can be entirely your own and still need to exist somewhere other than your laptop in six months.

What has changed since that rule was written is the route between the two. Until v0.6.3 there was none. Now there is one, in one direction, deliberately narrow.

Why it matters to you

The phrase is a sequence, and the sequence is the point. Alone first: read the sources, form a first view, build the agent that reads them your way. Multiplayer when it is ready: post the conclusion, put the draft to specialists, leave the trail a colleague can pick up.

The route is the Buzz Handoff skill, published under skills/ in Berd's repository and installed independently of the app. It does two things and refuses a third:

• Reads. Give a Berd agent a buzz://message link or a channel id and it reads the thread through the Buzz command-line client, summarises only the relevant context, and continues privately. Buzz content is treated as untrusted source material, never as instructions.
• Writes, with approval. It sends a reply only after showing you the exact full text, the destination channel and the reply target, and waiting for an explicit yes. Editing the wording is not approval; any change means a fresh preview and a fresh yes. The reply is prefixed 🤖 unless the configured identity is deliberately a distinct agent identity.
• Does not borrow an identity. It needs buzz on the path and a relay address and private key in the agent's environment, set outside the chat. It will not read Buzz Desktop's keychain or select an identity Buzz Desktop manages, and never asks you to paste a key.

Everything else moves by hand: post the conclusion, upload the file, rebuild the agent in Buzz. The Berd conversation itself does not travel.

How to apply it

Decide where a piece of work lives before you start it. Moving it later means building it again. If unsure whether other people will be involved, start in Buzz; a quiet channel costs little.

Use the handoff for what it is: a Buzz thread brought into a private session to think, and one approved message sent back. Read the preview every time; it is the only gate between your draft and the signed record.

Set the identity deliberately. If the key in the environment is your own, the reply carries your name with a robot prefix; if you want it to come from an agent, configure a distinct agent identity in Buzz first.

If you ignore this

Weeks of engagement reasoning sit in one laptop's chat history, and the handover meeting is the first time anyone hears how a decision was reached. Or a private draft reaches a client channel because "looks good" was taken as approval of text since edited.

Examples

AnalogyConcreteNon-example

Your own desk and the meeting room. You think at the desk; you bring one page into the room; nobody carries papers from your desk into the room without your reading the page first.

A specialist raises a question in the engagement channel. You paste the message link into Berd, work through it privately with Pushback, and approve one reply. It appears in Buzz marked as from an agent; the working stays on your laptop.

Expecting a Berd agent to "check Buzz" on its own. Without the handoff skill and its environment, Berd agents do not know Buzz exists; with it, they read only the link or channel you gave them.

Do it: Hand work between Berd and Buzz

Last checked: Berd v0.6.4, 2026-09-11.

Reference

• Designing AI with character: what we learned building Berd — Block, published 2026-08-18. Source of "start alone, then go multiplayer".
• block/berd — skills/buzz-handoff/SKILL.md — requirements, read and write workflows, the approval rule
• block/berd — README.md — published skills are separate from the app's bundled skills
• Buzz or Berd — the one rule, the word mapping, client material

Verified

Berd v0.6.4 · 2026-09-11