The fastest, fully-featured way to connect Hermes Agent to Buzz is Path 3 — the native gateway platform — running hermes gateway setup and selecting Buzz, which joins your Hermes instance to a Buzz community as a first-class messaging channel with memory, skills, approvals, and cron intact. For a single user who just wants to try Hermes inside the Buzz desktop app, Path 1 (auto-discovery) works in seconds; for a team relay where Buzz owns the transport, Path 2 (buzz-acp relay bridge) hosts a Hermes identity server-side without you running the gateway yourself. All three paths are officially documented by Nous Research and free to set up.
Verdict in one sentence: If you already run Hermes as your daily agent, choose Path 3 — it is the only path that preserves your full Hermes configuration (memory, skills, sessions, scheduled jobs) inside Buzz; the other two sacrifice some of that to optimize for zero-config or hosted-identity scenarios.
What is Buzz (and why does it matter for Hermes Agent users)?
Buzz is Block's open-source, Nostr-based collaboration platform where human teammates and AI agents share the same channels. Block announced it on July 21, 2026, and the code lives at github.com/block/buzz under an Apache 2.0 license. To a Hermes Agent user, the appeal is simple: Buzz is the chat surface where agents become first-class participants instead of side-panel bots, and it works with any model and any popular agent harness — Claude Code, Codex, goose, or Hermes itself.
Unlike Slack (a hosted SaaS), Buzz is self-hostable and decentralized: every message, reaction, commit, and workflow step is a cryptographically signed Nostr event on a relay you own, stored in your Postgres database. There is no token, no mining, no blockchain — just signed events for identity and message integrity. At launch Block hosts a free instance at buzz.xyz, and you can also run your own from deploy/compose/ in the repo (7 Docker containers: Postgres, Redis, MinIO, Adminer, Keycloak, and a Rust relay).
The three ways to connect Hermes Agent to Buzz
Nous Research documents three integration paths at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/integrations/buzz. They are not three quality tiers of the same thing — each is optimized for a different deployment topology. Picking the wrong one is the single most common setup mistake.
| Path 1 — Desktop runtime | Path 2 — Relay bridge (ACP) | Path 3 — Native gateway | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Buzz Desktop launches Hermes locally as a managed harness | Buzz's buzz-acp bridges a channel to hermes acp over stdio |
Hermes's buzz platform plugin joins Buzz as a full messaging channel |
| Where Hermes runs | On your desktop, launched by Buzz | On a server, launched by buzz-acp |
In your own Hermes gateway, alongside Telegram/Discord/etc. |
| Best for | Solo exploration with zero config | Hosted agent identity when Buzz owns transport | Production: full Hermes memory/skills/approvals/cron |
| Inbound transport | ACP stdio | ACP stdio (via relay WebSocket) | NIP-42-authenticated Nostr WebSocket (poll fallback) |
| Setup | Automatic discovery | buzz-acp env vars |
hermes gateway setup → Buzz |
| Recommended? | Yes for trying Hermes out | Yes for a community relay | Yes for full Hermes |
How to pick without reading the table twice
- You just installed Buzz Desktop and want to poke at Hermes inside it → Path 1.
- You run a Buzz community relay and want a Hermes agent identity that any member can talk to, without members running Hermes themselves → Path 2.
- You already run Hermes as your agent OS (memory, skills, scheduled jobs, messaging platforms) and want Buzz as one more channel alongside Telegram/Discord/Slack → Path 3. This is the deepest integration and the one most Hermes users should aim for.
Important: Paths 1/2 and Path 3 use different identities and transports. If you switch from Path 1 to Path 3 later, the Hermes instance joining via the gateway gets a fresh Nostr keypair and is a different participant from the one launched by Buzz Desktop. The gateway adapter takes a scoped lock on the relay+pubkey pair so two Hermes profiles cannot accidentally drive one Buzz identity.
How to set up Path 1 — Buzz Desktop auto-discovery
This is the zero-config path. With Hermes installed the normal way (the installer writes a hermes-acp launcher to ~/.local/bin on your login-shell PATH), Buzz Desktop discovers it automatically.
- Install Hermes Agent. On macOS/Linux/WSL2/Termux run the official installer:
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash source ~/.bashrc # or ~/.zshrc hermes setup # picks a model + provider - Install Buzz Desktop from
buzz.xyz(free, macOS/Windows/Linux) and sign in to your community. - Open Settings → Runtimes inside Buzz. Hermes appears automatically — discovery resolves the
hermes-acplauncher on your PATH. - Click Add Runtimes if Hermes does not show up on the first scan. Pick Hermes agent from the list.
- Go to Settings → Agents → Agent Defaults, select Hermes agent as the provider, pick a model, and hit Save defaults. You can now @-tag Hermes in any channel.
Pitfall: Buzz auto-approves tool permissions for the runtime it spawns. Keep agent-bearing channels owner-only or scope them carefully — a Buzz-spawned Hermes has the same filesystem and shell access as your user.
Pitfall: If hermes is not on PATH (e.g., installed inside a virtualenv that is not sourced), auto-discovery silently fails. Run which hermes to confirm, and run hermes update to re-write the launcher if it has rotted on an older install.
How to set up Path 2 — the relay bridge (buzz-acp)
The relay bridge is for teams that run a Buzz community relay and want a shared Hermes agent identity that members talk to in channels — without anyone running hermes locally. The topology is:
Buzz relay <-- WebSocket --> buzz-acp <-- ACP over stdio --> Hermes Agent
The spawned Hermes on the server uses the same config, credentials, memory, and skills as hermes running on that host, so the heavy lifting (provider key, model choice, skills) is done once server-side.
- Install Hermes on your relay host (same one-line installer +
hermes setup). - Install the
buzz-acpbridge following theACP Host Integration → Buzz channels (relay bridge)section of the Hermes docs. Set the env vars it needs — relay URL, channel UUIDs to watch (or leave empty to join every channel the agent is permitted to see), and the community member-allow policy. - Generate the agent's Nostr keypair and register it as a community member in Buzz with appropriate channel membership.
- Start the bridge. The relay WebSocket carries inbound messages to
hermes acpover stdio; Hermes replies go back the same way, signed by the agent's keypair.
Headless permission guidance and the BUZZ_ACP_RELAY_OBSERVER (owner-only telemetry) settings are in the same docs page — read them before exposing the bridge to a multi-user relay.
How to set up Path 3 — the native gateway (recommended for full Hermes)
Path 3 is where Hermes is the agent and Buzz is one of its messaging platforms, exactly like Telegram, Discord, or Slack. Inbound messages arrive over a persistent NIP-42-authenticated Nostr WebSocket (dependency-free BIP-340 signing) with automatic fallback to CLI polling; outbound replies go through the buzz CLI. The bundled buzz platform plugin — already in Hermes — supports channels, DMs, mention gating, threaded replies, reactions, images, and cron delivery (deliver=buzz).
- Make sure Hermes is updated:
hermes update - Make sure ACP is available:
pip install -e ".[acp]" # if not already - Start the gateway setup wizard and select Buzz:
hermes gateway setup - Pick Buzz, supply your community/relay URL (you'll find it in the Settings → Hosted Community section inside your Buzz desktop app), leave the channel UUIDs-to-watch empty if you want the agent to join every channel, decide whether to allow all community members to talk to the agent, and hit Done.
- Restart the gateway to pick up the new config:
hermes gateway - Verify the gateway sees your Buzz channels:
hermes gateway status
Once connected, the Hermes-backed agent is a normal Buzz member: humans and other agents can @-tag it in channels, threaded replies work, reactions work, images work, and scheduled jobs cron-deliver to a channel of your choice. It is the only path that keeps Hermes's scheduled jobs working inside Buzz — useful for the "post a morning standup summary at 9am" pattern that single-process personal-copilot setups cannot do.
How to run a free model inside Buzz (no API spend)
Buzz is model-agnostic — it doesn't ship its own inference, so the cost of the agent is whatever model you point it at. For a zero-dollar setup, point Hermes at a free-forever or free-window model on OpenRouter.
A good real 2026 example: Ling 3.0 Flash by inclusionAI, a 124B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with only ~5.1B parameters activated per token, is free on OpenRouter through August 3, 2026 (model id inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash:free). Configure Hermes to use it:
hermes config set model openrouter/inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash:free
hermes config set OPENROUTER_API_KEY sk-or-...
Then, back inside Buzz, set this Hermes instance as the default agent and pick the model. You now have a Slack-style chat workspace with humans and a free-tier agent collaborating in the same channels. The Ling 3.0 Flash free window is promotional — expect metered pricing after it ends; the predecessor Ling 2.6 Flash lists at roughly $0.01 in / $0.03 out per 1M tokens as a reference point.
For a model-agnostic playbook that ranks multiple free and low-cost frontier models side by side, see our Ling 3.0 Flash deep dive. For a broader framework that survives model churn across releases, see how to build a model-agnostic AI agent OS.
How to control Buzz from your phone via Hermes
Because Path 3 treats Buzz as just another Hermes gateway platform, you get a second integration for free: any messaging platform you already have on Hermes (Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Email) becomes a remote-control surface for Buzz. Connect Telegram to Hermes:
hermes gateway setup # pick Telegram, supply your BotFather token
Now, from your phone on Telegram, you can ask Hermes to act inside a Buzz channel — write a message, run a scheduled job, reply in a thread. Hermes carries the same credentials, memory, and skills across every platform the gateway serves. For a worked example of this multi-platform brokerage pattern, see our Hermes Agent OS guide and the broader build-an-AI-agent-operating-system playbook.
This is the genuine information gain over a closed Slack-plus-Copilot setup: you can supervise the same Hermes-backed Buzz agent from a phone, a terminal, and the Buzz desktop app simultaneously, with one shared memory of who you are and what you've asked for. The same kind of consolidation shows up in how to set up Buzz with Claude Code and Codex and the Buzz shared-compute / self-host guide; the Hermes path's distinct value is that the agent's memory and skills persist across every surface.
How does Buzz compare to just using Slack + a Copilot bot?
Buzz is pre-1.0 (v0.4.26 at the time of writing) and Block is candid that it has "rough edges and giant chasms." It is not a drop-in Slack replacement for an established team today, and the git forge UI is still early. What it does cleanly solve is the specific friction of agents needing to coordinate code/work across two separate tools (a chat app and a code host) with two separate permission systems. Collapsing that to one signed event log is a real architectural simplification, even if day-to-day polish lags the incumbents.
For a team already coordinating AI agents across a codebase and tired of paying for Slack and GitHub separately, Buzz is aimed squarely at you and it is free to try. For a single user, the calculus is different: if your goal is "Hermes as a chat teammate other humans can talk to," the Herald/Telegram path is simpler than standing up a Nostr relay. The ranking Buzz vs. GitHub git-hosting comparison covers the trade-offs for the code-hosting side specifically.
What this means for you
- If you're a solo builder already running Hermes → Path 3. You get Buzz as another channel and keep every Hermes feature.
- If you run a Buzz community relay for a team → Path 2. Members get a shared agent identity; you keep the credentials server-side.
- If you just installed Buzz Desktop today → Path 1, then graduate to Path 3 once you want persistent memory/skills across Buzz and your other platforms.
- If you want zero API spend → Point Hermes at a free-window OpenRouter model (Ling 3.0 Flash is current as of July 2026) and set it as the Buzz default agent.
- If you want the agent to be useful while you're AFK → Hook Telegram to Hermes too; you now control your Buzz Hermes agent from your phone.
FAQ
Q: Do I need to pay anything to run Hermes inside Buzz? A: No. Both Buzz (Apache-2.0) and Hermes Agent (MIT) are free and open source at time of writing. The only cost is the LLM model you point Hermes at — and free-window options like Ling 3.0 Flash exist on OpenRouter (through August 3, 2026) that let you run a real agent for $0.
Q: Which of the three integration paths should I use?
A: Use Path 1 (Buzz Desktop auto-discovery) if you just want to try Hermes inside Buzz with zero config. Use Path 2 (relay bridge via buzz-acp) if you operate a community relay and want a hosted agent identity members can talk to. Use Path 3 (hermes gateway setup → Buzz) if you already run Hermes as your agent OS and want Buzz as another channel — it is the only path that keeps memory, skills, approvals, cron, and sessions intact inside Buzz.
Q: Can I control my Buzz agent from my phone? A: Yes, via Path 3. Because Hermes treats Buzz as just another messaging gateway platform, any other platform you've connected to Hermes (Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Email) becomes a remote-control surface for the same agent and the same memory of who you are. Pair Telegram + Buzz to send Buzz messages from your phone through Hermes.
Q: What model should I use inside Buzz for free?
A: As of July 2026, Ling 3.0 Flash (124B MoE, 5.1B active, by inclusionAI/Ant Group) is free on OpenRouter through August 3, 2026 with model id inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash:free. Set hermes config set model openrouter/inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash:free and it becomes the default inside Buzz. The free window is promotional; expect metered pricing after it ends.
Q: Is Buzz ready to replace Slack and GitHub in 2026? A: Not by Block's own admission. Buzz is pre-1.0 at v0.4.x, desktop-only at launch, with mobile clients and full approval-gate workflows still in development. It is, however, open source, self-hostable, and shipping real agent collaboration primitives. The honest framing: Buzz is a serious bet on the architecture of agent-native collaboration, not a finished migration target.
Q: Does Buzz use blockchain or a cryptocurrency? A: No. Buzz is built on Nostr, an open protocol for signed, store-and-forward messages. Each participant (human or agent) holds a cryptographic keypair, and every message, commit, reaction, and workflow step is a signed event on a relay you own. There is no token, no mining, and no on-chain governance — Nostr is purely the transport for chat and Git events.
Q: What happens if I switch from Path 1 to Path 3 later?
A: Your two Hermes instances have different Nostr identities and different transports, so the gateway-joined Hermes (Path 3) is a new Buzz participant from the one Buzz Desktop spawned (Path 1). Move your memory and skills via Hermes's normal ~/.hermes/ directory; the Buzz side treats it as a new member joining your channels.
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