7 ms·

Goose: An open-source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions

249 points by sansui12 2y ago

juunpp 2y ago
It advertises that it runs locally and that it is "extensible" but then requires you to set up a remote/external provider as the first step of installation? That's a rather weird use of "local" and "extensible". Do words mean anything anymore?
- kylecazar 2y ago
  Yeah, they seem to be referring to the Goose agent/CLI that are local. Not models themselves.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    You can run ollama, so no, not only Goose itself.
    - kylecazar 2y ago
      Fair, but the repeated references to local/on-machine on the project's homepage which OP criticized is, I would think, in reference to the Goose agent.
- demarq 2y ago
  Did you not see Ollama?
- tonygiorgio 2y ago
  Can’t you just run ollama and provide it a localhost endpoint? I dont think its within scope to reproduce the whole local LLM stack when anyone wanting to do this today can easily use existing better tools to solve that part of it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- raincole 2y ago
  You went as far as checking how it works (thus "requires you to set up a remote/external provider as the first step"). But you didn't bother checking the very next section on side bar, Supported LLM Providers, where ollama is listed. The attention span issue today is amusing.
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    > The attention span issue today is amusing. I find it rather depressing. I know it's a more complex thing, but it really feels irl like people have no time for anything past a few seconds before moving onto the next thing. Shows in the results of their work too often as well. Some programming requires very long attention span and if you don't have any, it's not going to be good.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      But people really have no time. There is only one brain and thousands of AI startups pitching something every day.
      - anonzzzies 2y ago
        Yeah, don't need to try any until everyone says 'you have to'. Which happened with Aider and later Cline & Cursor.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - unification_fan 2y ago
      But this is an elevator pitch. I didn't come here to be marketed to, yet I am being marketed to. So if you're going to market something to me at least do it right. My attention span is low because I don't really give a shit about this.
- hiyer 2y ago
  You can use it with ollama too
XorNot 2y ago
I don't know how useful this is, but my immediate reaction to the animation on the front page was "that's literally worse then the alternative". Because the example given was "change the color of a component". Now, it's obviously fairly impressive that a machine can go from plain text to identifying a react component and editing it...but the process to do so literally doesn't save me any time. "Can you change the current colour of headercomponent.tsx to <some color> and increase the size vertical to 15% of vh" is a longer to type sentence then the time it would take to just open the file and do that. Moreover, the example is in a very "standard" format. What happens if I'm not using styled components? What happens if that color is set from a function? In fact none of the examples shown seem gamechanging in anyway (i.e. the Confluence example is also what a basic script could do, or a workflow, or anything else - and is still essentially "two mouseclicks" rather then writing out a longer English sentence and then I would guess, waiting substantially more time for inferrence to run.
- taneq 2y ago
  On the one hand, this isn’t a great example for you because you already knew how to do that. There’s probably no good way to automate trivial changes that you can make off the top of your head, and have it be faster than just doing it yourself. I’ve found LLMs most useful for doing things with unfamiliar tooling, where you know what you want to achieve but not exactly how to do it. On the other hand, it’s an okay test case because you can easily verify the results.
- pjm331 2y ago
  Yeah the fact that just composing the first prompt would take me longer than just doing the thing is my biggest blocker to using any of these tools on a regular basis
  - ehnto 2y ago
    Which is also assuming it gets it right the first prompt, and not 15 minutes of prompt hacking later, giving up and doing it the old fashioned way anyway. The risk of wasted time is higher than the proposed benefit, for most of my current use cases. I don't do heaps of glue code, it's mostly business logic, and one off fixes, so I have not found LLMs to be useful day to day at work. Where it has been useful is when I need to do a task with tech I don't use often. I usually know exactly what I want to do but don't have the myriad arcane details. A great example would be needing to do a complex MongoDB query when I don't normally use Mongo.
alexkehayias 2y ago
So I gave goose a whirl and I actually really like the approach they are taking, especially because I use emacs and not vscode. I would recommend people try it out on an existing project—the results are quite good for small, additive features and even ones that are full stack. Here's a short writeup of my notes from trying to use it https://notes.alexkehayias.com/goose-coding-ai-agent/ https://notes.alexkehayias.com/goose-coding-ai-agent/
- terhechte 2y ago
  Which LLM did you use with Goose? That really affects the quality of the outcome
  - alexkehayias 2y ago
    I’m using gpt-4o which I think is the default for the OpenAI configuration. Haven’t tried other models yet but old like to see how o3-mini performs once it’s been added.
    - alexjhancock 2y ago
      Hi - Alex here from the Goose team. We do already support o3-mini. If you're using the OpenAI provider you can enter that model in the settings screen of the app. Let me know if you have any trouble.
grimgrin 2y ago
this is the page i’d link to https://block.github.io/goose/docs/goose-architecture/ https://block.github.io/goose/docs/goose-architecture/
aantix 2y ago
How does this compare to Cline or Cursor's Composer agent?
bckr 2y ago
Today I decided that what I need is: - prompt from command line directly to Claude - suggestions dumped into a file under ./tmp/ (ignored by git) - iterate on those files - shuttle test results over to Claude Getting those files merged with the source files is also important, but I’m not confident in a better way than copy-pasting at this point.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Aider is fantastic. Worth a look.
  - bckr 2y ago
    I’ve been playing with it and I don’t like it that much? I’m not sure why. It feels a little buggy and like it’s doing too much.
    - yoyohello13 2y ago
      You’re being downvoted for some reason but I feel the same. It’s cool tech but I’ve found I often need to revert changes. It’s far too aggressive with tweaking files. Maybe I can adjust in the settings, idk. Also, it’s expensive as hell to run with Claude sonnet. Cost me like $0.01 per action on a small project, insane. At this point I still prefer the chat interface.
      - extr 2y ago
        You can basically get the same experience as aider with an MCP server like https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw. It's not perfect - sometimes has trouble with exact syntax of find/replace. But it's free to use up to your regular Claude subscription usage limit. I actually use it more than Cursor, because it's easier to flip back and forth between architecting/editing.
        yoyohello13 2y ago
        Thanks! I’ll take a look at this. It always kind of annoyed me to pay for API credits on top of a subscription, lol.
esafak 2y ago
Are people finding agent frameworks useful or they are unnecessary dependencies like Langchain?
Keyframe 2y ago
I don't know if anyone find this useful, but it seems rather useless / not working? I tried with numerous online and local llms for good measure. I installed that computerController extension and tried couple of dozens different versions of open a website (url) in a browser and save a screenshot. Most of the time it wouldn't even open a website, and I never got a screenshot. At best it did open a website once and saved a html (even though I asked a screenshot); and that one was unique in a bunch when it did something instead of complaining it can't find AppleScript or whatever on a linux machine.. I qualified the ask by telling it it's on linux. It managed to find which distro it was on even. Really weird overall.
- DrewHintz 2y ago
  I’ve had luck with a workflow similar to: git clone a repo Open goose with that directory Instruct it to discover what the repo does Ask it to make changes to the code, being detailed with my instructions. I haven't tried computerController, only Goose’s main functionality.
goldenManatee 2y ago
Regarding the “Extensible,” doesn’t that completely moot its whole point?
pzo 2y ago
This looks very promising. I only played a little bit yesterday but they really need to polish the UI. Comparing to desktop version of chatgpt or perplexity they are in much lower league. Some feedback for team: 1) use better font and size 2) allow to adjust shortcuts and have nice defaults with easy change 3) integrate with local whisper model so I can type with voice triggered with global shortcut 4) change background to blend with default system OS theme so we don't have useless ugly top bar and ugly bottom bar 5) shortcuts buttons to easily copy part of conversion or full conversation, activate web search, star conversion so easy to find in history etc. They should get more inspiration from raycast/perlexity/chatgpt/arcbrowser/warpai ui/cursor
po 2y ago
Have many other projects put MPC servers (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction) to use since it was announced? I haven't seen very many others using it yet.
- paulgb 2y ago
  Cursor also just got support this week. Overall it’s still early (MCP only came out a couple of months ago) but seeing multiple clients that allow it to be used with non-Anthropic models, and getting good results, makes me bullish for MCP. My colleague has working on an MCP server that runs Python code in a sandbox (through https://forevervm.com https://forevervm.com, shameless plug). I’ve been using Goose a lot since it was announced last week for testing and it’s rough in some spots but the results have been good.
bArray 2y ago
Running locally is such an important feature, running elsewhere is an instant non-starter for me. I also want the LLM to be able to read the code to build an in-context solution, but not be able to make changes unless they are strictly accepted.
letniq 2y ago
Is it the same as ollama?
93po 2y ago
I'm confused what this does that Cursor doesn't. The example it shows on the front page is something Cursor can also easily do.
- netfl0 2y ago
  Open source licensing where the limit is on the ai-backend right?
- lordswork 2y ago
  The one that stands out most to me is that it doesn't bundle the AI features with the editor. This is a standalone application that runs on the side of your editor/tools of choice.
betimsl 2y ago
Does anyone know alternatives to this? GUI Frontend for various AI providers? (incl. ollama, etc)
register 2y ago
But... how does it work? The documentation is really confusing . How to make it aware of code file and project structure?
- DrewHintz 2y ago
  I tell it to discover that itself by asking leading questions: “What does this repo do?” “How do you run its unit tests?” “What does file foo do?”
yencabulator 2y ago
This is amusing/worrying. > Make sure to confirm all changes with me before applying. https://block.github.io/goose/docs/guides/using-goosehints https://block.github.io/goose/docs/guides/using-goosehints So, we're supposed to rely on LLM not hallucinating that it is allowed to do what it wants?
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >So, we're supposed to rely on LLM not hallucinating that it is allowed to do what it wants? Yes. Frontier models have been moving at light speed over the last year. Hallucinations are almost completely solved, particularly with Anthropic models. It won't be long before statements like this sound the same as "so you mean I have to trust that my client will always have a stable internet connection to reach out to this remote server for data?".
  - feznyng 2y ago
    This is missing the human language ambiguity problem. If you don't perfectly specify your requirements and it misinterprets what you're asking for that's going to be a problem regardless of how smart it is. This is fine with code editing since you've got version control and not so great when running commands in your terminal that can't be as trivially reverted. Besides that, you can absolutely still trick top of the line models: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/claude-computer-use-c2-the-zombais-are-coming/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/claude-computer-us... Hallucination might be getting better, gullibility less so.
  - threecheese 2y ago
    As a regular Claude user, incorrectness is not anywhere near solved; it may be domain-dependent, but just yesterday 3.5 invented a Mac CLI tool that does not exist (and would’ve been pretty useful if it had). I cannot take anything factual at face value, which is actually OK as long as net/net I’m still more productive.

249 points by sansui12 2y ago

It advertises that it runs locally and that it is "extensible" but then requires you to set up a remote/external provider as the first step of installation? That's a rather weird use of "local" and "extensible". Do words mean anything anymore?

kylecazar 2y ago
Yeah, they seem to be referring to the Goose agent/CLI that are local. Not models themselves.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  You can run ollama, so no, not only Goose itself.
  - kylecazar 2y ago
    Fair, but the repeated references to local/on-machine on the project's homepage which OP criticized is, I would think, in reference to the Goose agent.
demarq 2y ago
Did you not see Ollama?
tonygiorgio 2y ago
Can’t you just run ollama and provide it a localhost endpoint? I dont think its within scope to reproduce the whole local LLM stack when anyone wanting to do this today can easily use existing better tools to solve that part of it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
raincole 2y ago
You went as far as checking how it works (thus "requires you to set up a remote/external provider as the first step"). But you didn't bother checking the very next section on side bar, Supported LLM Providers, where ollama is listed. The attention span issue today is amusing.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  > The attention span issue today is amusing. I find it rather depressing. I know it's a more complex thing, but it really feels irl like people have no time for anything past a few seconds before moving onto the next thing. Shows in the results of their work too often as well. Some programming requires very long attention span and if you don't have any, it's not going to be good.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    But people really have no time. There is only one brain and thousands of AI startups pitching something every day.
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Yeah, don't need to try any until everyone says 'you have to'. Which happened with Aider and later Cline & Cursor.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - unification_fan 2y ago
    But this is an elevator pitch. I didn't come here to be marketed to, yet I am being marketed to. So if you're going to market something to me at least do it right. My attention span is low because I don't really give a shit about this.
hiyer 2y ago
You can use it with ollama too

XorNot 2y ago

I don't know how useful this is, but my immediate reaction to the animation on the front page was "that's literally worse then the alternative". Because the example given was "change the color of a component". Now, it's obviously fairly impressive that a machine can go from plain text to identifying a react component and editing it...but the process to do so literally doesn't save me any time. "Can you change the current colour of headercomponent.tsx to <some color> and increase the size vertical to 15% of vh" is a longer to type sentence then the time it would take to just open the file and do that. Moreover, the example is in a very "standard" format. What happens if I'm not using styled components? What happens if that color is set from a function? In fact none of the examples shown seem gamechanging in anyway (i.e. the Confluence example is also what a basic script could do, or a workflow, or anything else - and is still essentially "two mouseclicks" rather then writing out a longer English sentence and then I would guess, waiting substantially more time for inferrence to run.

taneq 2y ago
On the one hand, this isn’t a great example for you because you already knew how to do that. There’s probably no good way to automate trivial changes that you can make off the top of your head, and have it be faster than just doing it yourself. I’ve found LLMs most useful for doing things with unfamiliar tooling, where you know what you want to achieve but not exactly how to do it. On the other hand, it’s an okay test case because you can easily verify the results.
pjm331 2y ago
Yeah the fact that just composing the first prompt would take me longer than just doing the thing is my biggest blocker to using any of these tools on a regular basis
- ehnto 2y ago
  Which is also assuming it gets it right the first prompt, and not 15 minutes of prompt hacking later, giving up and doing it the old fashioned way anyway. The risk of wasted time is higher than the proposed benefit, for most of my current use cases. I don't do heaps of glue code, it's mostly business logic, and one off fixes, so I have not found LLMs to be useful day to day at work. Where it has been useful is when I need to do a task with tech I don't use often. I usually know exactly what I want to do but don't have the myriad arcane details. A great example would be needing to do a complex MongoDB query when I don't normally use Mongo.

alexkehayias 2y ago

So I gave goose a whirl and I actually really like the approach they are taking, especially because I use emacs and not vscode. I would recommend people try it out on an existing project—the results are quite good for small, additive features and even ones that are full stack. Here's a short writeup of my notes from trying to use it https://notes.alexkehayias.com/goose-coding-ai-agent/ https://notes.alexkehayias.com/goose-coding-ai-agent/

terhechte 2y ago
Which LLM did you use with Goose? That really affects the quality of the outcome
- alexkehayias 2y ago
  I’m using gpt-4o which I think is the default for the OpenAI configuration. Haven’t tried other models yet but old like to see how o3-mini performs once it’s been added.
  - alexjhancock 2y ago
    Hi - Alex here from the Goose team. We do already support o3-mini. If you're using the OpenAI provider you can enter that model in the settings screen of the app. Let me know if you have any trouble.

grimgrin 2y ago

this is the page i’d link to https://block.github.io/goose/docs/goose-architecture/ https://block.github.io/goose/docs/goose-architecture/

aantix 2y ago

How does this compare to Cline or Cursor's Composer agent?

bckr 2y ago

Today I decided that what I need is: - prompt from command line directly to Claude - suggestions dumped into a file under ./tmp/ (ignored by git) - iterate on those files - shuttle test results over to Claude Getting those files merged with the source files is also important, but I’m not confident in a better way than copy-pasting at this point.

vessenes 2y ago
Aider is fantastic. Worth a look.
- bckr 2y ago
  I’ve been playing with it and I don’t like it that much? I’m not sure why. It feels a little buggy and like it’s doing too much.
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    You’re being downvoted for some reason but I feel the same. It’s cool tech but I’ve found I often need to revert changes. It’s far too aggressive with tweaking files. Maybe I can adjust in the settings, idk. Also, it’s expensive as hell to run with Claude sonnet. Cost me like $0.01 per action on a small project, insane. At this point I still prefer the chat interface.
    - extr 2y ago
      You can basically get the same experience as aider with an MCP server like https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw. It's not perfect - sometimes has trouble with exact syntax of find/replace. But it's free to use up to your regular Claude subscription usage limit. I actually use it more than Cursor, because it's easier to flip back and forth between architecting/editing.
      - yoyohello13 2y ago
        Thanks! I’ll take a look at this. It always kind of annoyed me to pay for API credits on top of a subscription, lol.

esafak 2y ago

Are people finding agent frameworks useful or they are unnecessary dependencies like Langchain?

Keyframe 2y ago

I don't know if anyone find this useful, but it seems rather useless / not working? I tried with numerous online and local llms for good measure. I installed that computerController extension and tried couple of dozens different versions of open a website (url) in a browser and save a screenshot. Most of the time it wouldn't even open a website, and I never got a screenshot. At best it did open a website once and saved a html (even though I asked a screenshot); and that one was unique in a bunch when it did something instead of complaining it can't find AppleScript or whatever on a linux machine.. I qualified the ask by telling it it's on linux. It managed to find which distro it was on even. Really weird overall.

DrewHintz 2y ago
I’ve had luck with a workflow similar to: git clone a repo Open goose with that directory Instruct it to discover what the repo does Ask it to make changes to the code, being detailed with my instructions. I haven't tried computerController, only Goose’s main functionality.

goldenManatee 2y ago

Regarding the “Extensible,” doesn’t that completely moot its whole point?

pzo 2y ago

This looks very promising. I only played a little bit yesterday but they really need to polish the UI. Comparing to desktop version of chatgpt or perplexity they are in much lower league. Some feedback for team: 1) use better font and size 2) allow to adjust shortcuts and have nice defaults with easy change 3) integrate with local whisper model so I can type with voice triggered with global shortcut 4) change background to blend with default system OS theme so we don't have useless ugly top bar and ugly bottom bar 5) shortcuts buttons to easily copy part of conversion or full conversation, activate web search, star conversion so easy to find in history etc. They should get more inspiration from raycast/perlexity/chatgpt/arcbrowser/warpai ui/cursor

po 2y ago

Have many other projects put MPC servers (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction) to use since it was announced? I haven't seen very many others using it yet.

paulgb 2y ago
Cursor also just got support this week. Overall it’s still early (MCP only came out a couple of months ago) but seeing multiple clients that allow it to be used with non-Anthropic models, and getting good results, makes me bullish for MCP. My colleague has working on an MCP server that runs Python code in a sandbox (through https://forevervm.com https://forevervm.com, shameless plug). I’ve been using Goose a lot since it was announced last week for testing and it’s rough in some spots but the results have been good.

bArray 2y ago

Running locally is such an important feature, running elsewhere is an instant non-starter for me. I also want the LLM to be able to read the code to build an in-context solution, but not be able to make changes unless they are strictly accepted.

letniq 2y ago

Is it the same as ollama?

93po 2y ago

I'm confused what this does that Cursor doesn't. The example it shows on the front page is something Cursor can also easily do.

netfl0 2y ago
Open source licensing where the limit is on the ai-backend right?
lordswork 2y ago
The one that stands out most to me is that it doesn't bundle the AI features with the editor. This is a standalone application that runs on the side of your editor/tools of choice.

betimsl 2y ago

Does anyone know alternatives to this? GUI Frontend for various AI providers? (incl. ollama, etc)

But... how does it work? The documentation is really confusing . How to make it aware of code file and project structure?

DrewHintz 2y ago
I tell it to discover that itself by asking leading questions: “What does this repo do?” “How do you run its unit tests?” “What does file foo do?”

yencabulator 2y ago

This is amusing/worrying. > Make sure to confirm all changes with me before applying. https://block.github.io/goose/docs/guides/using-goosehints https://block.github.io/goose/docs/guides/using-goosehints So, we're supposed to rely on LLM not hallucinating that it is allowed to do what it wants?

ramesh31 2y ago
>So, we're supposed to rely on LLM not hallucinating that it is allowed to do what it wants? Yes. Frontier models have been moving at light speed over the last year. Hallucinations are almost completely solved, particularly with Anthropic models. It won't be long before statements like this sound the same as "so you mean I have to trust that my client will always have a stable internet connection to reach out to this remote server for data?".
- feznyng 2y ago
  This is missing the human language ambiguity problem. If you don't perfectly specify your requirements and it misinterprets what you're asking for that's going to be a problem regardless of how smart it is. This is fine with code editing since you've got version control and not so great when running commands in your terminal that can't be as trivially reverted. Besides that, you can absolutely still trick top of the line models: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/claude-computer-use-c2-the-zombais-are-coming/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/claude-computer-us... Hallucination might be getting better, gullibility less so.
- threecheese 2y ago
  As a regular Claude user, incorrectness is not anywhere near solved; it may be domain-dependent, but just yesterday 3.5 invented a Mac CLI tool that does not exist (and would’ve been pretty useful if it had). I cannot take anything factual at face value, which is actually OK as long as net/net I’m still more productive.