Goose

Overview

Maintainer	Agentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation) — created and still backed by Block
Type	Terminal CLI + desktop app
Pricing	Free — open source, bring your own model
Protocol	MCP
Config Formats	AGENTS.md
Repository	aaif-goose/goose
Website	goose-docs.ai

What It Does

Goose is an open-source agent that runs locally on your machine. It reads your codebase, makes edits, and runs commands, pairing model reasoning with a large library of tool integrations through MCP.

Block built it and released it under an open licence in January 2025. In 2025 it moved to the Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation body launched by Block, Anthropic, and OpenAI — the same foundation that now hosts Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. Block remains an active maintainer, but governance is neutral.

That position makes Goose the place new MCP ideas get tried in practice before they settle into the spec.

Key Strengths

• Neutral governance: a foundation rather than a single vendor, which matters for something you build a workflow on
• Runs locally: your machine, your keys, your files
• Deep MCP support: it is effectively the reference ground for MCP extensions
• Both surfaces: terminal and a desktop app
• Model-agnostic: bring whichever provider you want
• Large contributor base: 500+ contributors and daily development

Trade-offs

• Bring-your-own-key, so cost control is yours
• Built for coding specifically — it will not run your calendar the way a general personal agent does
• Quality tracks the model behind it

Where to Find Skills

Goose sits alongside MCP and AGENTS.md under the same foundation, and skills are the third piece: procedures rather than tools or project context. The largest open catalogue is atskills.one, with 60,000+ skills — see @skills.

Best For

• Teams that want an open agent with governance behind it rather than one company’s roadmap
• Heavy MCP users
• Local-first and privacy-bound work

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