The nine surfaces and when to use each
The desktop app presents nine surfaces onto the same event log. Seven are stable; two are behind the experiments toggle.
Stable: Home is a personalised feed of what needs you. Stream is fast topic chat. Forum is async long-form. DMs are one-to-one or small group conversations. Agents is where agents are created, configured, started and stopped. Workflows holds automation and its run traces. Search reaches across everything you have access to.
Preview: Projects puts git repositories inside the workspace — repository trees, diffs, reviews and project workspaces bound to channels. Pulse is an activity feed of notes, social posts and agent activity, read as trajectory rather than transcript.
They are lenses rather than silos: the same underlying events appear through different views, which is why search works across all of them at once.
Two of the nine are preview features
Projects and Pulse sit behind the experiments toggle in Settings, alongside Forum channels. They are under heavy active development — Projects took ten pull requests across v0.5.13–v0.5.18 alone — which means they are worth exploring and not yet worth depending on. Nothing in a project design should assume either one is stable this quarter. Last checked: Buzz v0.5.20, 2026-09-02.
Why it matters to you
Choosing a surface is a design decision about how a conversation will go. Stream produces quick reciprocal exchanges; Forum produces considered responses that people write once and revise. In a project that difference maps onto real distinctions — working chat versus a deliverable put to a specialist for comment.
It also affects agents, which read the context of whichever room they are in.
The two preview surfaces change the shape of the question rather than adding to it. Projects means code review, issues and the discussion about them can live in the same event log as the work conversation, rather than in a separate tool with a separate identity system. Pulse means agent activity has somewhere to go that is not the channel it happened in — supervision without the working conversation being drowned in it.
How to apply it
Use Stream for the working conversation of a project, where speed matters and messages are cheap.
Use Forum where you want people to think before replying: analysis findings put to experienced colleagues, a proposed plan, anything you would otherwise have emailed as a document.
Use Home as the starting point of a working session rather than scanning channels — it assembles mentions and items waiting on you.
Use Search as the project's memory. Over weeks, it is faster than remembering which channel something was in.
Treat DMs as the exception, not the default. Work that happens in a DM is invisible to the workspace, to colleagues, and to the agents whose usefulness depends on context.
Try Projects if your engagement has a repository in it, and keep the authoritative copy elsewhere until it leaves preview.
Use Pulse when you are supervising several agents at once and the channels have become unreadable. It is the answer to "what has been happening", where the channel answers "what is being decided".
If you ignore this
Getting this wrong is not dramatic, it is corrosive. Long-form deliberation in Stream gets buried under chat; quick coordination in Forum stalls because nobody replies to a formal post with one word. Both push people back into email, and the context that makes the workspace valuable stops accumulating.
Getting the preview surfaces wrong is dramatic in a different way: building a delivery commitment on top of a feature behind an experiments toggle, in the product area moving fastest.
Examples
A draft workflow map posted in Forum gets three considered responses from specialists over two days. The same map dropped into Stream gets one "looks good" and scrolls away.
Someone returning after a week away opens Home rather than six channels, and finds the two things actually waiting on them.
A lead running four agents opens Pulse to read trajectory across all of them, then goes to the one channel where a decision is actually waiting.
Running an entire project in DMs because it feels tidier. Nothing is searchable by the team, no agent has context, and the audit trail records a workspace where nothing happened.
Moving a client's repository into Projects as the working copy because the integration is compelling. It is a preview feature; keep the authoritative copy where it was.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026