# Goose by Block

29 Hacker News commenters recommended Goose by Block and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open-source coding agent praised for lean context and working with many model providers; critics say setup is hard and it trails big-brand tools.

## Why people recommend it

- Works with many model providers (4 comments): "They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46225448)) "I've been using with tmux + goose-cli + claude via openrouter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527109)) "goose has now native support for local models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781646))
- Lean system prompts and context (3 comments): "Goose works for web search if you use SearchXNG, and has fairly slim system prompts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434915)) "Goose was the only harness that didnt bloat context too much with system prompts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49245878)) "Goose doesn't load as much context in at the start, so it might be more usable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49404325))
- Good database and migration tooling (3 comments): "Goose is great, been using it for many years and is my goto db schema manager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790382)) "Goose[0] migrations in Go are really great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058346)) "goose for SQL and Go migrations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913636))
- Actively developed, improving versions (2 comments): "Under active development and the implementation seems to have a good leg up on the other popular agents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260027)) "If anyone tried it a while back, the newer versions are worth a look." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46242575))

## What people warn about

- Hard setup and manual provider config (2 comments): "Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568211)) "Getting this running was alot of work and is certainly not perfect" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417591))
- Poor UI and CLI experience (3 comments): "UI experience was also very poor comparing to many other open source projects" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212235)) "Goose was super jank when I last tried it. Not worth a look" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213139)) "I thought their CLI was poor." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207396))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Code](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-code.md): 4522 recommend
- [OpenAI Codex](https://hackerapproved.com/p/codex.md): 2474 recommend
- [OpenCode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/opencode.md): 1060 recommend
- [Gemini CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini-cli.md): 172 recommend
- [Cline](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cline.md): 63 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Goose by Block", https://hackerapproved.com/p/goose/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).