Efficient Tokens & Effective Teams in Buzz

Atish Patel on Block’s Buzz, an internal workspace where several agents sit in shared channels alongside humans, each with its own persona, memory and seat. The question the post sets out to answer is which agents you should actually put on a job. Block’s answer is a tiered cast: QuickBee on cheap fast models for documented legwork, WorkerBee in the middle owning subtasks on its own, and SmartBee on frontier models kept for coordination and judgment.

The benchmarking is the useful part. Running real Buzz agents over live relays, they found a 5.5x price spread among the top scorers on Terminal-Bench 2.1 separated by only 8.9 points of score, which is a neat illustration that paying more stops buying much fairly quickly. On their long-horizon benchmark a SmartBee with two WorkerBees hit 71.5% against 59.1% for a solo agent, completing 20 of 44 tasks outright versus 15, or about a third more work.

The finding worth carrying away is the conditional one: team composition only paid off on long tasks. On short, well-specified work the extra coordination bought nothing, and the team structure was just overhead. Their summary is “not every task needs your smartest agent. Pick the right bee. Build the right team.”