Goose started as an internal project at Block, the fintech company behind Square and Cash App, before being open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. It runs either as a desktop app or a CLI tool entirely on a developer's own machine, and can define and execute multi-step engineering tasks with real autonomy: generating code, running tests, debugging, calling APIs, and managing files.
Its model support goes through the Model Context Protocol, so it isn't locked to one provider. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon Bedrock, OpenRouter, and local Ollama models are all usable, letting a team pick based on cost or performance rather than vendor lock-in. Agent recipes let developers package up specific workflows for reuse, which matters more as teams build up a library of tasks they want an agent to repeat reliably.
Goose moved under the governance of the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation, a step that signals an intent to keep it as neutral, broadly-governed infrastructure rather than tied to Block's own roadmap indefinitely.