The first thing worth saying about Goose is that it is not trying to sell you a model. Most of the AI coding agents that matter in mid-2026 are funnels — the agent is good, and it happens to route you toward the vendor's own frontier model and the vendor's own subscription. Goose, the open-source agent Block has been building in the open, inverts that. It is a host: you bring the model, you bring the tools, and Goose orchestrates them on your machine. When Block handed governance of the project to the Linux Foundation — which we covered as news on this site — that posture stopped being a marketing claim and became a structural fact. Nobody owns the steering wheel anymore.
I ran Goose for a couple of weeks on an M2 MacBook Air, mostly in the CLI, against a real TypeScript codebase and a pile of one-off shell-and-file chores. What follows is the hands-on take: what the daily workflow actually feels like, where the MCP extension model pays off, where the rough edges are, and how it compares to the two terminal agents most people will be choosing between — Claude Code and OpenCode. I went in skeptical of "vendor-neutral" as a feature. I came out thinking it is the most interesting thing about the tool, with caveats.
