Goose

Goose is a local AI agent released by Block as open source. It runs on your machine, either as a desktop app or a command-line tool, and can write code, run it, install packages and fix its own errors. It is not limited to programming, since it can use any tool you connect through MCP.

Because it is model-agnostic, you can point it at a hosted model or at something running locally. That flexibility is the reason many developers keep it around as a free alternative to paid agents.

Expect to spend a little time on setup. Once extensions are configured, it handles repetitive project chores well, such as scaffolding, migrations and test fixes.