Shared context is the product
The thing Buzz actually sells is not chat and not agents — it is accumulated shared context. Everything said in a channel becomes material that every member of that channel, human and agent, can draw on. Because that context lives in the workspace rather than in a model, it survives model swaps, harness changes and agents being retired and replaced.
An agent's usefulness in Buzz is therefore mostly a function of what it has been in the room for.
Why it matters to you
This reframes what a good request looks like. Elaborate prompting exists to compensate for a model that knows nothing about your situation. In a channel carrying three weeks of a project, that compensation is unnecessary — short requests work because the context is already there.
It also reframes what channel discipline is for. Keeping a channel focused is not tidiness; it is protecting the input quality of every agent in it.
How to apply it
Say things in the channel rather than in a call or a DM, when you want them to count. Context that was not written down does not exist to the workspace.
Ask plainly and briefly. The channel supplies what a long prompt would have restated.
Keep channels scoped to one thread of work, so context compounds instead of blurring.
Put the anchor material — the project's scope, current state, decisions — in the canvas, where it functions as standing context rather than scrolling away. See Maintain the channel canvas.
Retire and replace agents freely; the context is not theirs to lose.
If you ignore this
Positively: an agent that has been in a channel for weeks gives answers a fresh chat cannot, and it keeps doing so after you change its model.
Negatively: the same mechanism makes unfocused channels actively harmful. Two projects in one room produce agents that confuse them, and nothing signals that this is happening — the answers just quietly get less right.
Examples
A colleague who was in the meeting versus a colleague who was not. You do not brief the first one from scratch, and you cannot skip briefing the second.
"Draft the article for the key-custody topic" is a complete request in a channel where the topic has been discussed. In a blank chat it would need three paragraphs of setup and still produce something generic.
A #general channel where an agent has read six months of unrelated chatter. It has enormous context and almost none of it is relevant, which is worse than none.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026