The Origin Story

[taniashiba]

From hack nights irl, to new resources taking flight, the magic of open source has been in full swing. Grab your favorite beverage, get comfy, and join us for a special look into Block's open source journey over the years, events on the horizon, and all the inspiring community moments that happened in between. 🪿

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Open source has been a major part of Block’s DNA since its early days as Square. While open source initiatives have been integral to the way we build for a long time, we wanted to give you a special look into what Block's open source journey was actually like throughout the years; talk about the AI framework, codename goose; and reflect on how transparency through open source aligns with Block's purpose of economic empowerment. So we sat down with @maniksurtani, Head of Open Source at Block with many years being part of the team, to talk about just that.

Manik also had the opportunity to tag-team with @baxen, Principal Engineer at Block and major open source contributor working on Goose, on the recent episode of the OSS Startup Podcast called, "How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects." You can expect to see what led Block to officially create the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), learn intimate facts about the Goose project you may not have heard about, and understand how ideas for projects like it come to life at Block.

The support the community has shown codename goose since its launch has contributed to the evolving conversation on AI agents and agentic work. The amount of time saved for employees across Block along with the support from the open source community caught Forbes' attention in their recent featured article, Goose is taking off in open-source circles.

Goose Soars Across the Block

Ever wondered how an open source AI agent scales within a Fortune 500 company? Our case study with Anthropic and Databricks shows how Block transformed codename goose from an internal developer tool into a company-wide productivity powerhouse, now used daily by thousands of Block employees across teams.

Explore the Goose Prompt Library

“What prompts should I use for my role?” Don’t worry, we got you! @blackgirlbytes created a central directory of effective Goose prompts organized by role, use case, and searchable keywords. This way, you can skip the prompt engineering and jump straight to results you need in your workflow.

Hermit Has A New Home

Give a warm welcome to the hermit team and community as they get comfy in their new home in the Block Open Source Discord. You can learn more about Hermit and how it ensures your team, contributors, and CI can have the same consistent tooling on the hermit docs site, explore the hermit GitHub repo, or enjoy the new hermit emoji on Discord. 🦀🐚

Coming To A City Near You

The very first Goose Meetup in Boston was a huge hit. The turnout and energy exceeded all expectations! From first-time Goose users to seasoned AI engineers, enthusiasts, open source contributors, and curious learners gathered to explore how Goose and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are shaping the future of AI automation with @blackgirlbytes, @EbonyLouis & @alexhancock.

The response was so electric that we continued the magic with a second, fun, #AIAgentHackNight in NYC! This time we ( @EbonyLouis & @alexhancock ) teamed up with Galileo ( @erinmikailstaples ) for a jam-packed evening, complete with sessions on codename goose and MCP. We even got to unveil the first ever codename goose swag. 🎊 It felt great to be with the community in person, and the team can’t wait for the next hack night! What city should we go to next? 👀

Block at Linux Foundation Member Summit

The team believes the magic of open source flourishes when you invest in collective progress. Last month, Block joined other Linux Foundation leaders at the Linux Foundation Member Summit in Napa, California. Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Lead @ALRubinger hosted a discussion among executives and builders on Fostering an Open Source Culture in a large organization - with thoughtful and engaged debate about how open principles can be applied in a variety of corporate and public environments. The event was a perfect setting to connect around shared goals and identify areas we can build better together, and it paves the path for more collaborative work between Block and the extended LF community.

Community Spotlight

This Open Sourcery chapter wouldn’t be complete without shining a brilliant spotlight on the latest top contributor. As the goose team continues to work on new features like Goose for Windows, which over 800 of you voted to express interest in, this community contributor stepped in to aid this ongoing effort.

Currently, goose CLI works on Windows with limited built-in extensions via WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux. Our featured contributor, ATrueLight4, contributed Goose4Win, an effort that improves Windows-specific path handling. Their contribution was merged into main, which means if you download goose CLI on Windows right now? You don’t need to install anything else to enjoy this change, and you won’t run into path navigation issues (like getting Goose to look at Windows-specific folders). Thank you so much for your contribution! Enjoy your exclusive badge on Discord, and one of the first top contributors to receive exclusive codename goose swag. (more info on that later 👀🪿)

In Case You Missed It

While there’s lots of in-person meetups happening offline, we always aim to make sure everyone across the world gets access to the latest learnings from Goose with blogs, demo videos and more.

Here are the top blogs of the month for you to check out:

• Securing the Model Context Protocol — At Block, we're all in on MCP! Learn how our InfoSec team is addressing security considerations like agent communication security, tool connectivity, and supply chain risk.❣️
• Community-Inspired Benchmarking: The Goose Vibe Check — We've been measuring Goose's performance with various AI models, including a variety of popular open-source models that can run locally on consumer hardware, and @alicehau’s blog shares our findings!
• MCP Explained for Non-Developers — Have you been hearing the term MCP but too scared to ask what it means? 🙈 @taniashiba got you. Here’s a guide for non-devs explaining what MCP is and how it can help you (no code required).
• How to Determine If An MCP Server Is Safe — We SEE you eyeing that MCP server. Yea, you. 👀🫵🏾 Before you plug your AI agent into it… ask yourself this, is it safe? @EbonyLouis put together this quick guide to help you figure that out.
• How I Use Goose to Plan My Week with Asana and Google Calendar MCPs — Mondays are overwhelming. A pile of unfinished tasks from last week, new priorities rolling in, and meetings scattered across the calendar. It’s a lot 😩. Instead of manually sorting through todos and figuring out where everything fits, @angiejones put together how she uses a couple of handy MCP servers with Goose and let it figure out her week.

For more visual learners and podcast listeners, here are some highlights from top livestreams that aired last month:

• Turning Tool Calls Into Phone Calls - What if AI Agents could pick up the phone and make a call for you? In this clip from Wild Goose Case, @paulotaylor demonstrates how to use Goose to trigger and manage phone-based interactions through VOYP, an AI-powered system that makes phone calls through its MCP server.
• Vibe Coding With The Speech MCP Server - Heard about vibe coding? What if you could build just by speaking? In this clip from Wild Goose Case, @Kvadratni, Senior Software Engineer, demonstrates coding, workflows & new ways to build hands-free—with the new Speech MCP.

Upcoming Events

If you’d like to catch one of our streams live, you can subscribe to us on YouTube, or subscribe to our events calendar here. Here’s what’s coming up for the next two weeks:

• From Tedious to Effortless: Automating Video Edits with Goose — April 11, 2025 at 1pm ET - Say goodbye to boring, repetitive edits! 👋🏾 In this livestream, @EbonyLouis & @iandouglas will be showing you how one designer, Juan Pablo Garcia, teamed up with Goose to automate After Effects workflows, turning one source composition into multiple formats automagically.
• Can Your AI Agent Keep A Secret? — April 18, 2025 at 1pm ET - AI agents are calling tools, automating workflows, and making moves on our behalf—by gaining access to our computers and data. But…can we truly trust them?? 🙊 @EbonyLouis is talking all things AI agent security with two amazing guests, Jessica Temporal—Senior Dev Advocate at Auth0, and @gadphly—Security Engineer & Manager at CashApp.

Keep Up With Block Open Source

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You can also follow us across our official social channels to keep up with us and what’s now. We’re on YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Discord, Bluesky, and Nostr.

Thank you so much for tuning in, until next time~

@taniashiba, Editor

~ Block Open Source

[blackgirlbytes]

Excited to see what we accomplish next month 💪🏿