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At a company-wide hackathon this month, developers at finance firm Block built a dizzying number of prototype tools including a database debugger, a program for identifying duplicated code, and an app that automates Bitcoin support.
The sudden productivity boost was driven by Goose, an artificial intelligence agent developed by Block several months ago that can help with coding and other work like knocking together data visualizations or mocking up new product features.
“We’ve always had really strong hack weeks, but this one was at another level,” says Jackie Brosamer, who leads the AI and data platform at Block. “We have tens of ideas that we’re looking to bring to production.”
Goose helped developers at Block to develop a new agent-to-agent communication server at the hackathon. The company says Goose has changed the way it works, not only helping automate code generation but also allowing non-engineers to dabble in coding or prototype for new apps or features.
I first spoke to Block several months ago, when Goose was a little less cooked than it is now. Developers at the company admitted that the agent increased their output but at the time also sometimes made mistakes like deleting the odd file (this can still happen sometimes). They ran the system on machines where any changes could easily be rolled back.
Agents are starting to change the way many developers and companies operate as AI models get better at managing code, using computers, and wielding tools. Over the past week, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all touted agentic coding tools. Block uses Anthropic’s Claude model by default, which is particularly good at coding and tool use.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey and the company’s CTO, Dhanji Prasanna, concluded that agents would shake up their industry in fall of 2024, when improved AI models triggered a significant leap in the performance of many agents. Dorsey and Prasanna decided that Block should build its own agent and that engineers and other staff should dive headfirst into using it.
Block’s Goose is available as open source (the name, in case you didn’t guess, was inspired by Maverick’s friend in the movie Top Gun).
Goose can be powered by a range of different AI models and will run commands and access files and folders on a computer. Goose can also tap into a growing number of online tools, like cloud storage platforms or online databases, thanks to the Model Context Protocol scheme for agent communications developed by Anthropic.
I used the latest version of Goose to knock together a few simple games and a basic visualization. It does a nice job of handling tedious things like ensuring the right version of Python is available and installing packages. Other tools I’ve tried seem as capable, but the Goose interface is particularly easy and intuitive, and it seems likely to become more powerful as it gains access to other tools and services.
