Goose by Block
Hacker ApprovedRanked 12 of 18 AI coding agents by recommenders
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.
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.
39 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 29
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 74%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 29 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Works with many model providers
“They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration” “I've been using with tmux + goose-cli + claude via openrouter”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone” “goose has now native support for local models”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator” - Comment from 25 Apr 2026 in “What's Missing in the 'Agentic' Story”
Lean system prompts and context
“Goose works for web search if you use SearchXNG, and has fairly slim system prompts.”
Comment from 25 Aug 2026 in “Qwen 3.6 is now much easier to run locally on your Mac, thanks to JetBrains” “Goose was the only harness that didnt bloat context too much with system prompts”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model” “Goose doesn't load as much context in at the start, so it might be more usable.”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is” Good database and migration tooling
“Goose is great, been using it for many years and is my goto db schema manager.”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “CLI to manage your SQL database schemas and migrations” “Goose[0] migrations in Go are really great”
Comment from 26 Jul 2026 in “Some more things about Django I've been enjoying” “goose for SQL and Go migrations”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “How I use HTMX with Go” Actively developed, improving versions
“Under active development and the implementation seems to have a good leg up on the other popular agents.”
Comment from 24 May 2026 in “DeepSeek reasonix, engineered for low token cost during long running sessions” “If anyone tried it a while back, the newer versions are worth a look.”
Comment from 12 Dec 2025 in “Agentic AI Foundation”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard setup and manual provider config
“Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “SpaceX to buy Cursor AI coding agent operator Anysphere for $60B” “Getting this running was alot of work and is certainly not perfect”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “What Is a Harness?” Poor UI and CLI experience
“UI experience was also very poor comparing to many other open source projects”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Agentic AI Foundation” “Goose was super jank when I last tried it. Not worth a look”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Agentic AI Foundation” “I thought their CLI was poor.”
Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Mistral AI Acquires Emmi AI to Create the Leading AI Stack”
Other AI coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other AI coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 4,522 | 3,788 | 54% | 13 | 6 mo417 owners | — |
| OpenAI Codex | 2,474 | 1,289 | 66% | 13 | 3 mo165 owners | — |
| OpenCode | 1,060 | 572 | 65% | 13 | 2 mo41 owners | — |
| Gemini CLI | 172 | 321 | 35% | 12 | 3 mo9 owners | — |
| Goose by BlockThis page | 29 | 10 | 74% | 12 | — | Approved |
What people said
35 of the 44 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“view it as something of a neutral opinion for a harness application”
“I have Goose installed which I have no real complaints about.”
“great options - but lag behind big-brand competitors in terms of token usage and generated code”
“Its docs have zero support”
“goose has now native support for local models”
“any of the open source ones like OpenCode, Pi, Goose”
“Goose works for web search if you use SearchXNG, and has fairly slim system prompts.”
“Getting this running was alot of work and is certainly not perfect”
“Goose doesn't load as much context in at the start, so it might be more usable.”
“Goose was the only harness that didnt bloat context too much with system prompts”
“goose[1] showed me what a whole team working toward the same idea could do”
“Goose[0] migrations in Go are really great”
“truly open alternatives to desktop agent apps”
“goose for SQL and Go migrations”
“Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings”
“I'm quite pleased with it as a middle ground.”
“Under active development and the implementation seems to have a good leg up on the other popular agents.”
“I thought their CLI was poor.”
“Tools like goose[2]are API agnostic.”
“something similar to goose cli providers or acp providers”
“It ended up going into what seemed like an infinite loop and consumed three-quarters of my monthly Poe subscription on a single prompt.”
“you can run https://block.github.io/goose/ in headless mode”
“nobody was using that crap, to the point that literally every testimony on their website is from their own team.”
“I've been using with tmux + goose-cli + claude via openrouter”
“poorly isolated agent tool”
“If anyone tried it a while back, the newer versions are worth a look.”
“Today? well it is like watching someone type each character at a time while your laptop melts.”
“They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter”
“It didn't get any better.”
“Goose was super jank when I last tried it. Not worth a look”
“UI experience was also very poor comparing to many other open source projects”
“Tried Goose, couldn't do anything.”
“None of these projects impress me”
“I found Goose (by Block) - https://block.github.io/goose - much better in this regard.”
“Goose is great, been using it for many years and is my goto db schema manager.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.