We've been measuring Goose's performance with various AI models, including a variety of popular open-source models that can run locally on consumer hardware (RTX 4080, Mac M-series). We understand that many in our community value a fully open-source, local experience without relying on cloud services.

This blog shares our findings comparing open-source models against their closed counterparts, highlighting both current performance gaps and paths for future improvement. Our benchmark is still in its early stages, but we wanted to release it as a starting point for distinguishing models that exhibit stronger agentic capabilities by their ability to pilot Goose (distinct from reasoning or other capabilities often captured in other popular benchmarks).

Authors: Alex Rosenzweig, Arihant Virulkar, Andrea Leoszko, Wes Ring, Mike Shema, F G, Alex Klyubin, Michael Rand, Zhen Lian, Angie Jones, Douwe Osinga, Mic Neale, Bradley Axen, Gelareh Taban

At Block, we’ve been working hard to augment the capabilities of AI tooling by building "MCP Servers" which are designed to help make our Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agent codename goose more capable of interacting with the systems and tools we care about.

Block’s Information Security (InfoSec) team has been heavily involved in this work and we wanted to capture our learnings in the space to help others. We expect there to be growing adoption and use cases for this including applying the technology in the security domain.

Imagine creating an app just by describing what you want out loud, like you’re talking to a friend. That’s the magic of vibe coding: turning natural language into working code with the help of an AI agent. And while typing a prompt gets the job done, saying it out loud hits different 🔥 The new Speech MCP server has quite literally entered the chat.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are everywhere right now. Last time I checked there were 3,000 and counting. Every day, a new one pops up, letting AI agents like Goose access files, query your Google Drive, search the web, and unlock all kinds of amazing integrations.

Question: What happens when you bring 70+ AI enthusiasts, open source contributors, and curious learners together in one room?

Answer: You get an electric night filled with great conversations, hands-on hacking, and mind-blowing insights into agentic systems.

This week, we hosted our very first Goose Meetup in Boston at the Cambridge Innovation Center. The turnout and energy exceeded all expectations! From first-time Goose users to seasoned AI engineers, attendees gathered to explore how Goose and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are shaping the future of AI automation.

Want to use Goose in VS Code? On the recent Wild Goose Case livestream, hosts Ebony Louis and Adewale Abati were joined by Andrew Gertig, Engineering Lead at Cash App, as he demonstrated the new VSCode MCP and how it brings powerful Goose-assisted coding capabilities directly into VS Code.

Mondays are overwhelming. A pile of unfinished tasks from last week, new priorities rolling in, and meetings scattered across the calendar. It’s a lot 😩. Instead of manually sorting through my todos and figuring out where everything fits, I use a couple of handy MCP servers with Goose and let it figure out my week.

Remember that saying, "it’s not what you ask, but how you ask"?

When I first started working with Goose as an AI agent, I was convinced there had to be one ‘best' prompting style. I spent so much time trying to figure out which one was superior, but the more I used Goose, the more I realized that couldn't be further from the truth. There isn’t one right way to prompt AI, but there are better approaches depending on what your end goal is.

So, let’s go through which prompt style works best for your specific needs, and how you can use them to vibe code a little better with Goose.

How do we debug AI agents like Goose? In the Goosing Around stream series, host Rizel Scarlett invited Marc Klingen, Co-Founder at Langfuse, and Alice Hau, Machine Learning Engineer at Block, to demo how Langfuse enables observability into Goose's actions, letting you trace LLM behavior and catch errors.

On the Goosing Around stream series, host Rizel Scarlett demonstrated how to use Goose locally with Ollama for a fully local experience on your device. Her guest, Parth Sareen, an experienced software engineer with a focus on building frameworks and systems for AI/ML, showed us the magic of structured outputs and how Goose and Ollama work together under the hood.