The first thing worth saying about Goose is that it is not trying to sell you a model. Most of the AI coding agents that matter in mid-2026 are funnels — the agent is good, and it happens to route you toward the vendor's own frontier model and the vendor's own subscription. Goose, the open-source agent Block has been building in the open, inverts that. It is a host: you bring the model, you bring the tools, and Goose orchestrates them on your machine. When Block handed governance of the project to the Linux Foundation — which we covered as news on this site — that posture stopped being a marketing claim and became a structural fact. Nobody owns the steering wheel anymore. I ran Goose for a couple of weeks on an M2 MacBook Air, mostly in the CLI, against a real TypeScript codebase and a pile of one-off shell-and-file chores.…