Notifications and the Home feed
Buzz does not push at you. There are no notifications by default; instead, the Home feed assembles what needs your attention when you open it — mentions, items waiting on you, channel and agent activity. Noise is opt-in rather than opt-out.
The consequence is simple: attention in Buzz is pull, not push.
One update since this article was first written: mobile push notifications have shipped, with an unusual privacy design — the relay never sees the device token, the push gateway sees neither public keys nor message content, and Apple's and Google's push services see none of it either (NIP-PL). This does not change the model. Zero remains the default; push is something you opt into on the phone, not a reversal of pull-first on the desktop.
Why it matters to you
For deep work this is a genuine benefit, and it is why the design chose it. For supervising autonomous agents it is a hazard, because nothing will tell you when something has gone wrong.
Those two facts sit together and both are true. The tool has removed the interruption and, with it, the safety net.
How to apply it
Build a rhythm rather than relying on being alerted. During an active project, at least daily; more often when agents are running unsupervised work.
Open Home first in every working session. It is the only surface that answers "what needs me" without scanning.
Do not assume silence means nothing happened. Silence is the default state whether things are going well or badly.
Where something genuinely must not be missed — a commitment to a stakeholder, a deadline — put a human check on it rather than expecting the workspace to raise its hand.
If you ignore this
A second, smaller update: desktop notifications now carry the sender's name, and clicking one routes correctly on macOS rather than landing you in the wrong place. That makes the few notifications you do get more useful; it does not make there be more of them.
If you transfer habits from a notification-driven tool, you will be reliably late to problems here, because your entire alerting model has been removed and nothing announced it.
The upside is real and worth protecting: a workspace full of agents working in parallel would be unusable if every action pinged you. Zero-notification is what makes an agent team tolerable to have.
Examples
A pigeonhole rather than a phone. Nothing rings; things accumulate; you go and check.
An agent loops for two hours over lunch, spending tokens. Nothing on your screen changes. The Home feed shows it when you look.
Delegating a stakeholder-visible recurring task and treating "I haven't heard anything" as confirmation that it ran. Nothing was ever going to tell you it did not. See Are workflows reliable?
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026