Block cut 40% of its workforce and then open-sourced Buzz, the AI Agent Workspace that makes it work 🤖🐝; Moonshot’s Kimi K3 just made frontier AI something you can own 🤖🔓
FinTech & AI is Eating the World, 28 July
Hey Everyone,
Good morning & happy Tuesday! Today, we're diving into Block's Buzz, the open-source AI agent workspace Dorsey just released after cutting 4,000 employees (how it actually works, why calling it a Slack killer misses the ultimate goal, what Block's internal numbers say about running a company on AI agents + the Full AI OS to Run a Startup with Claude & How to Build and Agentic OS with Claude Fable 5 inside), and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, the first open-weight model in the 3-trillion-parameter class, already running on consumer GPUs (why the architecture matters more than the parameter count, what the license tells you about Moonshot's strategy, & how this changes the rent-vs-own economics for anyone building on frontier AI + the Ultimate Guide to Kimi K3, and DeepSeek’s AI Playbook that erased $589B of Nvidia’s value inside). So let’s jump straight into the finovative stuff 🌶️
Block cut 40% of its workforce and then open-sourced Buzz, the AI Agent Workspace that makes it work 🤖🐝
The news 🗞️ In April, Jack Dorsey and Sequoia’s Roelof Botha published a 3,000-word essay arguing that hierarchy is just an information-routing protocol, and AI can replace it. The theory was sound. The messenger was not.
Remember that fintech giant Block XYZ 0.00%↑ had spent $68.1 million on a single company party in September 2025, then axed 4,000 employees just 5 months later. Ouch. The obvious question then was this: who handles fraud and accountability when you strip out the coordination layers where those things actually live? 🤔
On July 21, Block open-sourced Buzz, a self-hosted workspace built on Nostr where AI agents carry the same cryptographic identities, permissions, and audit trails as human employees.
→ It is designed to replace both Slack and GitHub with a single system where agents are not bots you summon but full members of channels who write code, run tests, review work, and hand off tasks.
→ Apache 2.0, model-agnostic, and built for a company that just told the market it can run on 6,000 people instead of 10,000.
Buzz is now Block’s clear operational answer.
Below, we break down how Buzz actually works, why calling it a “Slack killer” misses the point, what Block’s internal numbers say about running a 6,000-person company on AI agents, and whether this actually addresses the accountability gap we flagged in April.
