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Democratizing Detection Engineering at Block: Taking Flight with Goose and Panther MCP

· 17 min read
Tomasz Tchorz
Security Engineer
Glenn Edwards
Detection Engineer

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Detection engineering stands at the forefront of cybersecurity, yet it’s often a tangled web of complexity. Traditional detection writing involves painstaking manual processes encompassing log format and schema comprehension, intricate query creation, threat modeling, and iterative manual detection testing and refinement, leading to time expenditure and reliance on specialized expertise. This can lead to gaps in threat coverage and an overwhelming number of alerts. At Block, we face the relentless challenge of evolving threats and intricate system complexities. To stay ahead, we've embraced AI-driven solutions, notably Goose, Block’s open-source AI agent, and Panther MCP, to allow the broader organization to contribute high-quality rules that are contextual to their area of expertise. This post delves into how we're transforming complicated detection workflows into streamlined, AI-powered, accessible processes for all stakeholders.

3 Prompts to Test for Agent Readiness

· 3 min read
Angie Jones
Head of Developer Relations

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Goose is LLM-agnostic, meaning you can plug in the model of your choice. However, not every LLM is suitable to work with agents. Some may be great at answering things, but not actually doing things. If you're considering which model to use with an agent, these 3 prompts can quickly give you a sense of the model's capabilities.

How I Manage Localhost Port Conflicts With an AI Agent

· 3 min read
Rizel Scarlett
Staff Developer Advocate

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Localhost Ports Hoarding

I'm perpetually drowning in open tabs. Yes, I do need Bluesky, ChatGPT, Claude, Goose, Cursor, Discord, Slack, Netflix, and Google Docs all open at the same time. I've learned that tab management isn't my only vice.

"Hi, my name is Rizel, and I'm a localhost ports hoarder. 👋🏿"

Goose Gets a Driver's License!

· 7 min read
W Ian Douglas
Staff Developer Advocate

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I taught Goose how to drive (a rover)

Goose has no hands, no eyes, and no spatial awareness, but it can drive a rover!

I came across a demo video from Deemkeen, where he used Goose to control a Makeblock mbot2 rover using natural language commands like "drive forward/backward," "beep," and "turn left/right" powered by a Java-based MCP server and MQTT.

Inspired and excited to take it further, I taught the rover to spin, blink colorful lights, and help me take over the world!

Goose and Qwen3 for Local Execution

· 4 min read
Michael Neale
Principal Engineer

local AI agent

A couple of weeks back, Qwen 3 launched with a raft of capabilities and sizes. This model showed promise and even in very compact form, such as 8B parameters and 4bit quantization, was able to do tool calling successfully with goose. Even multi turn tool calling.

I haven't seen this work at such a scaled down model so far, so this is really impressive and bodes well for both this model, but also future open weight models both large and small. I would expect the Qwen3 larger models work quite well on various tasks but even this small one I found useful.

4 Things You Need to Know Before Using Goose

· 6 min read
Ebony Louis
Developer Advocate

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So you’ve heard about Goose. Maybe you saw a livestream, someone on your team mentioned it, or you just stumbled into our corner of the internet while trying to automate your dev setup. Either way—love that for you.

Goose is a local, open source AI agent that can automate tasks, interact with your codebase, and connect to a growing ecosystem of tools. But before you hit install, here are four things you should know to get the most out of it.

How One Contribution Can Spark Many Wins

· 3 min read
Tania Chakraborty
Senior Technical Community Manager

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The only way to discover how much of an impact your contributions can make is to submit them and hope for the best. Sometimes, what feels like "just a small fix" can end up reshaping an open source project or inspiring a brand new feature. Here's how one of our top contributors turned a small build fix into important improvements for the goose experience.