goose
A general-purpose open agent (desktop app, CLI and API) governed at the Linux Foundation.
goose (Apache-2.0) is a general-purpose AI agent that runs on your machine: a native desktop app for macOS, Linux and Windows, a full CLI, and an API to embed it, built in Rust. It writes code, but it is deliberately not only a coding tool; research, writing, automation and data analysis are in scope, which suits someone who used Claude Code for more than programming. It works with 15+ providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, OpenRouter, Azure and Bedrock, and connects to 70+ extensions over MCP. goose is part of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) at the Linux Foundation; its repository moved from block/goose to aaif-goose/goose, and the old address redirects.
What it does well
- +Foundation governance at the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, so no single vendor owns the roadmap
- +A desktop app, CLI and API from one engine, which makes it approachable for people who would rather not live in a terminal
- +15+ providers including Ollama, so it can run fully local
- +70+ MCP extensions, and a scope that goes well beyond code
Where it falls short
- −A generalist by design; if you only want a coding agent, a coding-first tool such as opencode will feel more focused
- −Moving your setup is manual: check which of your CLAUDE.md conventions, skills and hooks have a goose equivalent before committing
- −Running locally still needs real GPU memory, and a local model trails frontier models on hard agent tasks
Hardware note
goose itself is a light Rust binary or desktop app. Local inference is the cost: budget roughly 24 GB of VRAM or a 32 GB+ unified-memory machine for a 30B-class quantised coding model, or use a cloud provider.
goose as an alternative to
Where goose shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
goose head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.