Goose with Rizel Scarlett and Ebony Louis

Episode Description

Anthony Campolo chats with Rizel Scarlett and Ebony Louis from Block about Goose, an open source AI agent that leverages MCP to automate workflows.

Episode Summary

Anthony Campolo welcomes back Rizel Scarlett and first-time guest Ebony Louis, both developer advocates at Block, to discuss Goose, an open source AI agent built internally at Block that has expanded into a publicly available tool. The conversation begins with clarifying what Block actually is — the parent company of Square, Cash App, Tidal, and Afterpay — a revelation that surprises even the host. From there, the guests explain how Goose originated as an internal productivity tool for code migrations before evolving into a general-purpose AI agent that leverages Model Context Protocol to connect with virtually any MCP server. A live demo showcases Goose's desktop app generating a snake game, comparing Claude 3.5 Sonnet against Claude Sonnet 4, and attempting image generation for a YouTube thumbnail. The group discusses practical daily uses including documentation writing, killing localhost ports, scheduling calendar events, and using Google Drive integrations. They explore Goose's distinctive features like adjustable autonomy modes, context window management, and shareable "Recipes" that let users package and distribute their agent workflows. The conversation rounds out with reflections on how AI has transformed workflows for both junior and senior developers, resources for learning MCP, and the growing ecosystem of MCP servers and directories like Glamour AI.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introductions and What Is Block

Anthony introduces his two guests, Rizel Scarlett and Ebony Louis, both developer advocates at Block. Ebony Louis shares her unconventional path from speech pathology to software engineering to DevRel, while Rizel recounts her journey from GitHub to Block's TBD unit and eventually to working on Goose. The conversation includes some friendly banter about their shared coding bootcamp background and mutual connections in the developer community.

The group then tackles the question of what Block actually is, and Anthony has a genuine moment of surprise learning that Block is essentially the rebranded parent company of Square, along with Cash App, Tidal, and Afterpay. Rizel explains how Block builds technologies to support its subsidiary companies, including open source tools like Hermit and Goose, while the group jokes about the common confusion around the name change from Square to Block.

00:06:06 - What Is Goose and Defining AI Agents

Ebony Louis and Rizel explain the origin story of Goose — it started as an internal tool at Block built by engineer Bradley Axton, initially used for code migrations, before expanding across the company and eventually being open-sourced. They describe how Goose has evolved from a developer-focused agent into a general-purpose tool used by legal and business teams alike, powered by its integration with Model Context Protocol, which allows users to plug in any MCP server to automate various processes.

The conversation shifts to defining what an AI agent actually is, with Ebony Louis offering a concise definition: something that performs tasks on your behalf. Anthony adds a more technical framing, describing it as a loop on a language model where output feeds back as input, enabling self-correction. This leads into a discussion about how developers often build AI tools to solve their own problems, which then grow into broadly useful products.

00:11:13 - Live Demo: Snake Game and Model Comparisons

Rizel shares her screen to walk through the Goose desktop app, showing its terminal-like interface and the variety of LLM providers it supports. She demonstrates generating a snake game, first with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and then attempting Claude Sonnet 4, revealing an interesting finding from their benchmarks that 3.5 has outperformed 3.7 in their testing. The demo highlights differences between the two models, with Sonnet 4 automatically testing and running the game while 3.5 required manual steps.

Anthony draws comparisons between Goose and tools like Warp and Cursor, noting the interesting dichotomy between terminal-native and IDE-based AI tools. The group discusses personal preferences for different LLMs, with Anthony describing his workflow of running multiple models simultaneously and feeding their responses into each other. They also touch on Goose's VS Code extension, custom hints similar to Cursor rules, and the importance of setting up system prompts for preferred coding languages and styles.

00:25:11 - Computer Control, Image Generation, and Daily Workflows

Rizel describes Goose's computer controller feature, which can operate a local device to open browsers, play music, adjust settings, and perform web research all from a single prompt. The group then experiments with Goose's image generation capabilities by attempting to create a YouTube thumbnail for the episode, encountering the common limitations of AI image models around text rendering, dimensions, and following specific instructions.

The conversation transitions into how each person uses Goose daily. Ebony Louis describes using it for brainstorming, Google Drive document creation, and calendar management, while also highlighting the internal Glean integration that makes Goose an expert on Block's internal knowledge. She also shares her experience building an Afterpay MCP server and using the memory extension to preserve session context across work days, enabling seamless pickup of previous workflows.

00:36:54 - AI's Impact on Developer Workflows and Personal Use

Anthony asks Ebony Louis how AI has helped her as a junior engineer, sparking a discussion about how dramatically different the developer experience is compared to pre-ChatGPT days of endlessly Googling and browsing Stack Overflow. The group shares their expanding use of AI beyond coding — from content strategy and TikTok planning to cooking and learning about random topics. Anthony tells a humorous story about getting his wife, a Yale English graduate, converted to using AI tools.

The discussion takes a fun detour through a South Park episode about ChatGPT that perfectly illustrates the circular nature of AI in education, where students use it to write papers and teachers use it to grade them. Throughout this segment, the hosts demonstrate the Google Calendar integration live, running into timezone adjustment quirks, and reflect on how AI has made everyone more impatient with traditional search and reading.

00:49:16 - Goose Features: Modes, Context, and Recipes

Rizel walks through several key Goose features designed to address user comfort and practical limitations. She explains the different autonomy modes — autonomous, manual approval, smart-only, and chat-only — which let users control how much agency Goose has over their system. She also demonstrates the context window usage indicator and the summarize button, which helps manage the degradation that occurs in long LLM conversations.

Ebony Louis then explains Goose's Recipes feature, which allows users to package successful sessions into shareable agents complete with instructions, starter prompts, and pre-configured tools. This means workflows can be distributed to teammates who get access to the same tool configurations without any additional setup. Rizel teases an upcoming release featuring cron job scheduling for Recipes, while Anthony observes that Goose effectively delivers on MCP's promise of seamless integration by handling all the complex server and client connections for the user.

00:57:49 - MCP Resources, DevRel Life, and Closing

The group discusses resources for learning about MCP, with Ebony Louis recommending the Glamour AI directory for discovering and evaluating MCP servers, highlighting its automated safety testing and report card system. They also point to Block's collection of plug-and-play tutorial shorts on YouTube and Ebony Louis's visual guide blog post as starting points. The conversation covers the growing MCP ecosystem, including Block's collaboration with GitHub on an MCP registry.

The episode winds down with broader reflections on DevRel life, the value of advocating for a tool you genuinely use and enjoy, and quick mentions of text-to-speech technology and the 11 Labs MCP integration. The hosts share their social media handles, discuss upcoming conferences including the Kansas City Developer Conference, and Rizel mentions her recent life change of having a baby. Anthony promises to share an auto-generated summary of the stream, bringing the conversation full circle on the theme of AI-powered productivity.

Transcript

00:00:03 - Anthony Campolo

All right. Welcome back, everybody, to AJC and the Web Devs. We've got a returning web dev, Rizel. How are you doing, Rizel?

00:00:12 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm good. Thanks for having me.

00:00:15 - Anthony Campolo

And you brought a friend with you this time. Ebony Louis. How are you doing, Ebony Louis?

00:00:20 - Ebony Louis

Hi. I'm doing good. I'm happy to be here.

00:00:23 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, super happy to have you. Why don't you both introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about who you are and what you do, and then we can talk about what Block is.

00:00:36 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. Am I going first? My name is Ebony Louis. I'm a developer advocate at Block. I have a crazy journey into tech.

I started school for speech and language pathology to be a speech therapist. Then I got into software engineering. Loved it. Then I did technical community management, and now I'm a developer advocate.

00:00:59 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Where were you when you were first doing technical community management?

00:01:05 - Ebony Louis

At Block. I was being very strategic. I wanted to get into DevRel, but I didn't have the experience, so I decided to go in at a different angle. I got a technical community manager role and then got promoted to the role I wanted.

00:01:19 - Anthony Campolo

So I have a friend, Scott, who did technical community management at Edgio. Rizel knows Scott, I think.

00:01:27 - Rizel Scarlett

I remember Scott. Oh my God, what a throwback. Yeah. Cool.

00:01:33 - Anthony Campolo

Do you want to give a little blurb on yourself, Rizel?

00:01:36 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, it feels weird because you already know me from stuff like that. I started similarly to Ebony Louis. We both went to the same coding bootcamp at different times and started off as software engineers.

It was cool, but it wasn't my favorite type of role. I really like developer advocacy more because it allows me to use different strengths that I have.

Then I started working at GitHub, and I met you through Brian, and you were working at... It starts with an "S."

00:02:11 - Anthony Campolo

StepZen

00:02:11 - Rizel Scarlett

Thank you. Yeah, StepZen. I was going to say RedwoodJS, but I think you just contribute to it or... I don't know.

But yeah, I met you through there, and I had a great time working with GitHub Copilot and AI. I wanted to explore some other technologies and see what else was out there, so I went to Block and specifically their business unit called TBD, and worked on Web5 a little bit.

They shifted to focusing on more open source projects, including Goose, which is an open source AI agent. So I've moved over there since. Yeah, that's basically it.

00:02:51 - Ebony Louis

That was awesome.

00:02:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I was going to ask if we're in Web6 yet or if we're going to skip two this time and go straight to Web8.

00:03:01 - Ebony Louis

Like Web10 at this point. Way more secure.

00:03:06 - Rizel Scarlett

Mm-hmm.

00:03:07 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And y'all were on, or maybe it was just Ebony Louis, on Nick Taylor's stream, right?

00:03:14 - Ebony Louis

Yes, I was on that. That was fun.

00:03:16 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Yeah. Nick is a super good homie of mine, so I saw that you had done that. And I was like, oh, Goose. I'm about to do a stream on that.

So let's talk about what Block is before we talk about what Goose is. Block is kind of confusing even to me, as someone who is into Web3 and crypto. I always have a hard time placing it. How do I explain Block? It does a bunch of stuff. It feels like they've also pivoted.

So how do you explain Block in 2025?

00:03:46 - Ebony Louis

Well, let Rizel take this one away.

00:03:49 - Rizel Scarlett

I would describe it as a company of multiple companies, similar to how Microsoft owns GitHub and Microsoft is the parent company. I'm sure Ebony Louis has more to add.

Block is the parent company of Square and Cash App. And what else do we have? Tidal. Afterpay. Yeah. All these different organizations that you probably use in your day-to-day that help with financial empowerment in different types of ways.

Block itself builds different technologies, all in support of Square and Cash App. We have an open source project called Hermit, which is a package manager type of thing or a runtime management type of thing.

And then Goose is our open source AI tool that's helping these companies speed up productivity or accelerate productivity. And then we're also like, why not open source it to the rest of our community and not just hold that in for ourselves.

So Block's this parent that's enabling Square, Cash App, and Afterpay and Tidal to do their best work.

00:05:05 - Anthony Campolo

I feel so dumb right now. I didn't know Block was Square. I know Square, like Square's Jack Dorsey's company. I know what that is. I had no idea they changed it into Block. And this entire time, Block was just Square.

00:05:19 - Ebony Louis

Okay. There's so many people that share that same sentiment where they're like, wait, what is it? Then I'm like, oh, Square. They're like, oh yeah, I know.

00:05:27 - Anthony Campolo

That is so funny.

00:05:28 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, you're not dumb. Even me. I was confused at first. I was like, Squarespace? I was confused.

00:05:37 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Because I remember hearing about Square back in the day because I first got into crypto in the mid-2010s, and Jack Dorsey was very early to crypto. He has a unique place in it.

Some people think he's Satoshi Nakamoto, actually. And there's a pretty good case to be made for that. Honestly, I don't know if you guys have read that.

00:05:58 - Rizel Scarlett

No, I've seen people say that, but I don't know. I don't want to make any claims.

00:06:05 - Anthony Campolo

A square in 3D is a cube or a block. Ah, this is smart. Okay, cool. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. So then why Goose? Why did they make an open source AI thing?

00:06:21 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I feel like Rizel kind of touched on that a little bit. So when it came to Goose, it started internally. A small dev team created Goose, and they realized, wait, this is actually speeding up productivity. And it's really powerful and useful.

Then other teams throughout Block started using it. And then we decided we wanted to open it up and make it open source so that other people outside of Block can also get the power of Goose. So that's kind of how it happened.

00:06:46 - Anthony Campolo

Mm-hmm. So is it an agent thing? That's kind of what I've been led to believe.

00:06:56 - Rizel Scarlett

It is. It's an AI agent.

00:06:57 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. Sweet. Awesome. So what problem was it built to solve specifically?

00:07:04 - Rizel Scarlett

So... Oh, go ahead.

00:07:07 - Ebony Louis

I was going to say it solves so many problems. There really is not one specific problem that it was built to solve, but it's the power it has to speed up productivity in different workflows. You could be a non-engineer or an engineer, and it could speed up your workflow.

But I'm sure you might have a little bit more.

00:07:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I got stuff to add. I thought that was good, but I think initially, I hope I have this right, but what I heard when it first came out was that Bradley Axton, who works at Block, made it.

I think teams within Block were using it to help them do code migrations, and then they just started to add more and more to it.

And like Ebony Louis said, it's become more of a general-purpose tool. It's a developer agent, but it's become more general purpose where people on the legal team are using it, or different business teams are using it as a PDF reader.

I don't know if you've heard of Model Context Protocol. Probably have, right? People have been talking about it a lot.

00:08:10 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, we did. Dev and I did a stream on it about a month ago.

00:08:13 - Rizel Scarlett

Awesome. Yeah, because it's an AI agent that leverages MCP. You can basically plug in any MCP server to it, and then you can really automate anything.

If you have a BlueSky MCP server, if you have a GitHub MCP server, whatever it is, you could plug it in and it'll automate or help you automate those processes.

00:08:40 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. Yeah. No, that's really cool. And I think this is a good example of something where, with AI, a lot of devs are using it to solve their own problems, and then they do it in a way that's so useful that it becomes a bigger, broader tool. That's basically what happened with AutoShow.

And we should define the term "agent." It's one of those terms where people have a sense of what it means because they've used something and they've been told it's an agent, but it's hard to give a concrete definition. So either of you want to tackle that one?

00:09:21 - Ebony Louis

Defining what an agent is. Now I'm like, I need to know. I've never actually been asked that specific question.

00:09:30 - Anthony Campolo

I like definitions. It's a thing I always ask when we're doing anything. I'm like, so what is the thing you're talking about? What's the word mean?

00:09:38 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. So an agent is essentially something that can perform tasks on your behalf. I hope that's clear enough.

00:09:46 - Anthony Campolo

Great. Actually, I love that that's such a better, simpler definition than what anyone else has ever given me.

00:09:53 - Ebony Louis

Okay. Would you add more as well?

00:09:57 - Rizel Scarlett

No, I think that was it: software that does tasks on your behalf.

00:10:01 - Ebony Louis

Straight to the point.

00:10:03 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. No, I love that. The way I would describe it is more of a technical definition, but I think of it as a for loop on an LLM.

Basically, it does a task, gets some sort of input, gets some sort of output back, and then the output becomes the input to the next step. That's what makes it a really unique thing because it's an LM. It has the ability to take in language.

You could basically just keep feeding it back into itself. And as long as it has a way of detecting the error, it can fix it. And if it has the ability to reach out to enact whatever the error fix is, it can do that.

00:10:41 - Ebony Louis

I think that is the power with AI agents, their ability to detect errors and work through their own errors. And obviously, it'll come at some point where they do have to tell the user, "This is an error we can't get through," but most times it's able to self-correct with the LLM.

So that is a really good explanation as well.

00:10:57 - Anthony Campolo

Sweet. All right. Cool. So that was about ten minutes of intro. That's good. That was perfect. You guys are killing it. Don't worry.

Do you want me to put your screen up, Rizel? We can start getting into some code examples.

00:11:13 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, sure. We can do something. I don't have... What happened?

00:11:18 - Ebony Louis

Do a little tour of Goose.

00:11:20 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, exactly. I was like, I don't have a prompt yet in mind. We can go over stuff, but basically, you land here.

So we have a CLI tool, which I can show you as well. But we also have a desktop app. I like to show that more because it's more visual and easier to follow.

And of course, when you start here, it has a couple of demo things if you're like, oh, I don't know how to use Goose. What do I do? So if I click "Make a snake game in a new folder," it'll go ahead and do that for me.

At the bottom here, you'll see that you can bring your own LLM, so you'll have a model and a provider that's connected to it. Right now I like using Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Goose.

00:12:09 - Rizel Scarlett

We've done benchmarks, and we saw that that performs the best. But you can really bring in anything from O3 or GPT-4o.

You can even bring in a local model. However, the local models, the strength is just not there without a really powerful computer, right?

And then a couple of other things real quick.

00:12:31 - Anthony Campolo

I found that interesting, that 3.5 is better than 3.7 for Claude.

00:12:37 - Rizel Scarlett

And we were excited about 3.7. But when we got it, I don't know. I wasn't feeling it. What do you think, Ebony Louis?

00:12:45 - Ebony Louis

No, I agree. I feel like 3.5 so far has been the smoothest experience for me with tool calling and stuff.

00:12:51 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, I'm already on four, so I've moved beyond the debate. Thankfully.

00:12:57 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm beyond that. Okay.

00:13:00 - Anthony Campolo

It looks like you do have four on here as well.

00:13:03 - Rizel Scarlett

I actually haven't clicked it yet. I just like 3.5 so much, but I do experiments. Yes, we can come here.

00:13:12 - Anthony Campolo

I totally feel that, though. I'm the same way with using a model. It's a weird, kind of subjective but not entirely subjective thing, because some are legit better, but some people just enjoy talking to certain ones more.

Claude talks to you more like a person than ChatGPT, but I find that I get more consistency out of ChatGPT. For me, I really like being able to use both and bounce between the two.

I usually have three tabs open with different LLMs, and sometimes I'll feed the responses into each other. I'll have one give an answer and another one give an answer, then I'll give that answer to the other one and be like, hey, look at this implementation plan versus yours. Include any steps you miss that are in here. You know, kind of thing.

00:14:01 - Ebony Louis

I like that.

00:14:03 - Anthony Campolo

They will think of things that the other ones won't, or they'll solve problems in slightly different ways from the other ones.

00:14:09 - Ebony Louis

I've never done that workflow, having different ones up and asking questions and giving those answers to the other one. That's pretty dope. I'll have to try that.

00:14:17 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, and this is stuff you can program into workflows as well. And it looks like Goose supports all the main providers.

00:14:23 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. [00:14:24] - Rizel Scarlett Yeah. You literally can bring in a lot of providers. Let me show you.

00:14:29 - Anthony Campolo

When you first had this up, I thought this was Warp, not Goose.

00:14:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh no, this is Goose. Don't get us confused.

00:14:38 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. It has a very similar terminal-looking interface, very similar to Warp, which is good. I love Warp, so it's a compliment.

00:14:47 - Ebony Louis

Okay. These are some of the ones right now that we have for providers, but if there's also a provider that you want that's not there, you can open a GitHub issue. Add it to the list.

00:14:57 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I can. I got stuck in here. Hold on, I'm just going to close it.

00:15:05 - Ebony Louis

I wanted to show it.

00:15:07 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I want... what's the link?

00:15:17 - Anthony Campolo

What's the link in terms of where would you download the desktop app? Actually, I think I might just... I just answered my own question here.

00:15:17 - Ebony Louis

Oh, you have the link. Yeah.

00:15:20 - Anthony Campolo

This is it. Yeah. Everything is... no, block.github.io is the doc page landing page.

00:15:30 - Ebony Louis

You can see it right there.

00:15:38 - Ebony Louis

Does that work?

00:15:42 - Ebony Louis

Okay, let's see what to do.

00:15:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I was trying to resume the session. And you know how it opens a new window? Here we go. All right, so it told me it created it.

00:15:55 - Anthony Campolo

Can you actually bump your font up a couple?

00:15:57 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. There we go. Thank you.

00:16:02 - Rizel Scarlett

It created a file. So I'm going to go ahead and open this. It told me to go ahead and install the requirements and run the game. This is really simple. We can do something a little bit more complicated afterwards. But let's see.

00:16:16 - Ebony Louis

I think it might be cool to give the same prompt to Claude Sonnet 4.

00:16:20 - Rizel Scarlett

And see how it turns out. Yeah.

00:16:22 - Ebony Louis

And see how it turns out.

00:16:23 - Rizel Scarlett

I do.

00:16:24 - Anthony Campolo

That works.

00:16:25 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm going to put it side by side. Let me run the same prompt and open another session. That's the only thing: having all these sessions open. It's a little overwhelming.

00:16:37 - Ebony Louis

When sharing?

00:16:39 - Rizel Scarlett

So you guys want to try for Opus or for Sonnet?

00:16:44 - Anthony Campolo

Opus? Okay, that's the state of the art.

00:16:48 - Rizel Scarlett

Cool. I'm going to press enter. Go ahead. Let's see if it's the same results or not. In the meantime, I am going to open this file to see what we got. Open. And I'm going to go ahead... We can see... Sorry, guys. All these windows... I'll make this fine. We can see that we have this file that it made in here. And we're going to go ahead and do pip install requirements like it told us to do. So I think it's fine.

00:17:31 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, if you could get your Python dependencies installed, then it's definitely smarter than most people.

00:17:40 - Rizel Scarlett

Oops, I don't have it.

00:17:42 - Anthony Campolo

pip3.

00:17:43 - Rizel Scarlett

Three. Thank you. Install -r requirements. I can just copy and paste it. While that's happening, then I'll... Let's check the other one. I'll exit this. Where was Claude? Opus 4. Uh-oh. Temporarily unavailable. Mm.

00:18:05 - Anthony Campolo

Got rate limited. Yeah. This is an issue with Claude, more so than ChatGPT.

00:18:12 - Rizel Scarlett

Dang. Interesting.

00:18:14 - Anthony Campolo

Something's up with bedrock.

00:18:16 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, maybe Claude forced it on. We can try. That sucks. I wonder if that's it.

00:18:26 - Ebony Louis

I lose service.

00:18:28 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh. Did you? Yeah.

00:18:30 - Ebony Louis

You all started loading.

00:18:31 - Anthony Campolo

There's just a slight lag. It'll happen sometimes. StreamYard is usually pretty good, but every now and then you'll get just a little bit of lag. It's unavoidable.

00:18:40 - Ebony Louis

Like, where'd everybody go? All your faces are just a little loading.

00:18:45 - Rizel Scarlett

I can also tell that it's lagging.

00:18:47 - Anthony Campolo

I would tell it to write JavaScript like a normal programmer.

00:18:52 - Rizel Scarlett

I know, right? But I don't write Python.

00:18:59 - Ebony Louis

Python, I feel like, or at least it loves it.

00:19:02 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, Dev loves it. Yeah. I normally tell it to use JavaScript, but we're already this far, so I'm like, go ahead.

00:19:14 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I have a kind of custom prompt where I explain that I always want NodeJS TypeScript, not JavaScript. Use the most common or most recent version of Node. No semicolons. It's a whole set of things that kind of tell it to use ESM imports, not require. And so I just always drop that at the beginning of any session. Or you can do it as a custom instruction as well, so that it'll always know by default that I'm going to want it to write just in a modern TypeScript kind of way. And that usually gets me exactly what I'm looking for.

00:19:50 - Rizel Scarlett

That's the cool thing about Goose. I think maybe I need to update mine or something like that, but you know how you've used Cursor, right?

00:20:00 - Anthony Campolo

Where Cursor rules?

00:20:01 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

00:20:02 - Anthony Campolo

We have that.

00:20:02 - Rizel Scarlett

We have a thing that is like Goose hints.

00:20:05 - Ebony Louis

You can hint everything you were just talking about. Yeah.

00:20:10 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. Let's see. But let's try the NodeJS one and we can try a different prompt instead. So that'll be more interesting, and we can actually see the results I want to see. If we can have it, cool. Oh, actually, the Python game just popped up randomly and then closed.

00:20:37 - Ebony Louis

Hey, I just saw it literally for a split second.

00:20:43 - Rizel Scarlett

I think Goose just ran it. Oh yeah. It said, "I'll help you create it." It's happening in the background. It's installing Pygame.

00:20:50 - Anthony Campolo

I wrote it, I want to play it. Let's play it, guys. Let's play.

00:20:55 - Rizel Scarlett

It tested it and then it just closed it. All right, cool. So it's telling me that now.

00:21:01 - Anthony Campolo

It's probably trying to verify that the game worked.

00:21:03 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

00:21:05 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, I'll zoom in a little bit more for you guys, but it told me how to do it now. So it looks like, in comparison, 3.5 didn't test it and run it all for me, but Claude Sonnet 4 did all of that for me. So let's try it out now.

00:21:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. Okay. Hey, I'm going to open this again. It's all these windows... Come on. Okay. Hold on. Terminal, open. All righty.

00:21:40 - Anthony Campolo

So Goose doesn't have a way to integrate with Cursor, because I just saw that you could use Claude Code and Cursor together. I feel like Goose and Cursor you could probably use together in a similar way.

00:21:56 - Rizel Scarlett

I haven't seen it, but it does have a way for VS Code. I'll show you.

00:22:01 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, that's what I was thinking. That's because you're not integrated right now. You have a window that's separate from your editor, which is what's creating this kind of back and forth.

00:22:09 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, which is kind of annoying. But with VS Code, it does. This extension is more experimental, so I didn't want to show it off.

00:22:19 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. [00:22:20] - Rizel Scarlett Yeah, with VS Code.

00:22:21 - Anthony Campolo

That's probably right up your alley, the VS Code plugin.

00:22:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Right. Yeah.

00:22:25 - Ebony Louis

Yes.

00:22:26 - Rizel Scarlett

Let me see—since it's already here, maybe I could try to open it. Let's see. Oh.

00:22:35 - Anthony Campolo

This is an interesting dichotomy I've noticed over the last few years: terminal-native AI tools versus IDE editor tools. They're starting to merge, but they're still separate.

Some people like one more than the other. It depends on whether you're more of a terminal person or an editor person. It's interesting.

00:22:59 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I do think that's interesting. That's why we made it, because we started off with a terminal.

00:23:06 - Anthony Campolo

Exactly. That's very obvious. It looks like a terminal, which is why I thought it was one. It literally just looks like a terminal when you first open it.

00:23:13 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. And then some people were like, I really want this. This is cool, though. It made a script for me. I just realized it made the setup script for me, and then it has a script to run the game.

So now I'm not like, oh, let me do pip install or that thing I was struggling with before. So you guys, I might just start using Claude for this.

00:23:34 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, that experience.

00:23:37 - Anthony Campolo

There was a vibe argument about 3.5 versus 3.7. Sonnet 3.5 is quite obviously better. When they do the full number bump, they feel very confident that you're going to want to use this one right now.

00:23:55 - Rizel Scarlett

What did you say?

00:23:56 - Ebony Louis

Start using it and see what happens.

00:23:58 - Rizel Scarlett

Right? I was just so connected emotionally to 3.5.

00:24:03 - Ebony Louis

Whether it's a tool or whatever, you just get, "This is what works. I don't want to shake it up. This is perfect. This is all I need." Yeah, experiment.

00:24:14 - Rizel Scarlett

Exactly. But we can do more things with Goose. We don't have to just build developer things.

One demo I have isn't going to go great here, so I'm not going to show it because I tried before: the computer controller. I think it shows that because this is a local application, it can control your device locally.

So I've had it open Safari and go to YouTube, grab some classical music, do web research, and put the findings in an Excel sheet for me, all in one prompt. It just does it in one shot. I think that's cool, except it's hard to demo because it'll open the browser on one monitor and I'm trying to drag it over, and it'll dim or increase the brightness or the volume for me and stuff like that.

[00:25:11] So that one's cool, but hard to show. Yeah.

00:25:15 - Ebony Louis

That's cool. When you wrote the guide on it, I was like, this is dope. I would have never thought to have Goose create a little vibe for me, basically a decompressing vibe while I was doing research for her. And I'm like, I like that.

Yeah, classical music, then the lights—well, the brightness.

00:25:34 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I could do—thank you so much. I could do lots of things. I could send to Google Calendar.

00:25:44 - Anthony Campolo

Let's do the image generator.

00:25:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh.

00:25:46 - Anthony Campolo

The image generator.

00:25:48 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh. What do you want to generate?

00:25:51 - Anthony Campolo

I'm always curious about trying to generate something like a blog cover, like a YouTube thumbnail, because that's actually pretty challenging. So why don't we try to create a YouTube thumbnail? Okay.

00:26:05 - Rizel Scarlett

Let's create a—I don't know if you guys can see this.

00:26:10 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

00:26:11 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, a YouTube thumbnail.

00:26:13 - Anthony Campolo

Let's just do it for this episode.

00:26:15 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. That's exactly what I was thinking. A thumbnail for this.

00:26:22 - Ebony Louis

You have to actually use it. Whether we like it or not. That's right. We've already committed, Anthony.

00:26:29 - Rizel Scarlett

That's the challenge.

00:26:31 - Anthony Campolo

Let's just grab the main title for this specific video: Goose with Rizel, Scarlett, and Ebony Louis. Just do that.

00:26:39 - Rizel Scarlett

Rizel Scarlett and Ebony Louis.

00:26:43 - Anthony Campolo

You can just put, like, in parentheses: AJC and the Web Devs. Okay.

00:26:49 - Ebony Louis

How did you come up with your name, Anthony?

00:26:52 - Anthony Campolo

So AJC are my initials, Anthony Joseph Campolo. That was partly inspired by Tom Preston-Werner, who was the creator of GitHub and RedwoodJS. His blog was always TP, Tom Preston-Werner.

I needed a handle when I was first getting into web dev because I had old social accounts from when I was just a person who had social accounts, but I didn't have a specific handle that was unique to me. So I came up with AJC Web Dev because it was unique, and I could get that exact handle on every single site. I've never had an issue with that, and I always have the exact URL: AJCWebDev.

That then turned into the name for the show, because when I created the show, my friend Ben Myers was like, well, you've got to call it AJC and the Web Devs. And I was like, that is perfect.

[00:27:50] Oh my God.

00:27:52 - Ebony Louis

It really is. It's a perfect name. I don't even have a handle—mine is just Ebony Louis. Well, look, I've got to come up with something cool. Everyone has these cool roll-off-your-tongue kind of handles, because AJC and the Web Devs sounds nice.

00:28:06 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, that does sound nice.

00:28:08 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. I have to think of something.

00:28:10 - Anthony Campolo

I definitely encourage you to come up with a nice one.

00:28:13 - Rizel Scarlett

Memorable for your brand.

00:28:15 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I feel like naming things is hard when it comes to products. Anything—the naming is the hardest part.

00:28:22 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Band names. Naming the band is always the hardest part.

00:28:25 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, they have whole companies for this—actually just naming things.

00:28:31 - Rizel Scarlett

That's true. We got it, guys.

00:28:35 - Ebony Louis

Let's see what it's going to look like. We need a drum roll. Oh yeah, that looks perfect.

00:28:44 - Rizel Scarlett

Here we go.

00:28:50 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's what I expect. That seems about par for the course. So it's not good, but it's almost good sometimes.

00:28:58 - Rizel Scarlett

Sometimes. Okay, so I'm going to tell you—I run this live stream called The Great Goose Off, where I have two people versus each other and prompt Goose.

And I had them create a food delivery app, but one where you don't like any of the restaurants you'd want to order from, like creepy, disgusting foods or expired. And they generated some images that were so detailed and cool looking, like a burger that was really gross looking. So sometimes it's really good, but you have to be super detailed. The contestants were typing forever, and I was kind of like, wrap it up, time's up.

00:29:47 - Anthony Campolo

That sounds super fun. I'm going to check that stream out.

00:29:50 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, they're a lot of fun. The Great Goose Off.

00:29:56 - Rizel Scarlett

I didn't put enough effort into my prompt. I should have gone hard.

00:29:58 - Anthony Campolo

So can we modify the current image we have? Can we give feedback and have it generate a new one based off of it? Can you feed the image back into itself?

00:30:06 - Rizel Scarlett

Let's see. I actually never did that. I don't use this image generator that much because I'm not into generative AI art like that, but that is a good question.

Let's say, could we iterate on this image? How do you all want to make it? What do you want to change? I don't even know what the image looks like.

00:30:24 - Anthony Campolo

Well, the first thing I'd do is try fixing it so it actually has all the text on screen and is widescreen. So say make sure it's widescreen and none of the text is cut off. Give that feedback.

00:30:33 - Ebony Louis

First, the YouTube thumbnail wasn't the right dimensions.

00:30:37 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh.

00:30:38 - Anthony Campolo

That's what I'm saying when I say make it wide. That's the dimensions.

00:30:43 - Rizel Scarlett

For a YouTube thumbnail, make it wide and don't cut off the words. Let's see how it does.

00:30:53 - Anthony Campolo

How do you see what the underlying image model is that you're using right now?

00:30:59 - Rizel Scarlett

I think this is an in-house made thing, so I'm not sure if I'm able to reveal that.

00:31:07 - Anthony Campolo

Interesting.

00:31:07 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, we have—so at Block, we have MCP servers out there from the community, but because we're a fintech, we have some of our own in-house MCP servers because of all these different laws and PII. So I don't know; I'm using a particular one for Block, and I don't know if I should reveal that. [00:31:34] - Ebony Louis I'm excited to see what it changes.

00:31:36 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I hope it keeps the same one.

00:31:39 - Ebony Louis

I thought it was pretty solid.

00:31:41 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I do resize my images. So you guys know when you submit your talk to a conference on SessionizeApp and then sometimes the image is not the right size? I do have Goose resize it for me because I get stressed out when I'm like, I don't know what the dimensions are. That's not my type of thing, and it saves time.

00:32:06 - Anthony Campolo

This is stupid, but the way I always figure out what image dimensions are: I'll open it in Preview and then go to Adjust Size, and then it'll pop up with the width and the height.

00:32:17 - Rizel Scarlett

Why didn't I ever do that?

00:32:19 - Anthony Campolo

You can also just open it in Finder. If you have the right side window open in Finder, when you look at files it will show you the information there along with the size of it as well.

00:32:30 - Rizel Scarlett

That's a good point.

00:32:33 - Anthony Campolo

Dev said this happens to me every single time, right?

00:32:37 - Rizel Scarlett

It's so annoying. I'm like, why do you guys always want a different size than I already gave you? Let me see if it gave me—it didn't give me the path. So let's see if it—I'm going to search for it. Let's see if we can get the new one. What is it called? YouTube Thumbnail Fixed.png. It's still cut off. Let me see. Same thing.

00:33:05 - Ebony Louis

Oh, let me see it.

00:33:07 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm not happy.

00:33:09 - Anthony Campolo

This is probably why I was asking you what the image model is, because image models have only very recently—I would say with the newest ChatGPT image model—become good at following specific instructions like that. All the image providers started out as being something where you would describe a scene and it would create something really lush and intricate and artistic looking. And it wasn't like you could tell it exactly what to do in a highly specific way, like creating a thumbnail, and it would be able to follow that. The ChatGPT image model, like DALL-E, couldn't even spell words correctly. So this is better than that.

00:33:46 - Anthony Campolo

Things like it being cut off, that's hard for some of them. So that's why it's kind of important what the underlying model is for the user to know.

00:33:54 - Rizel Scarlett

Right. At least—yeah. Sometimes it used to generate images—not Goose but AI—and it would make me itch. At least some of these aren't making me itch. I don't know if that ever happened to you guys.

00:34:06 - Ebony Louis

Like, make you itch? It's so scary to look at.

00:34:10 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. I'm like, oh, the sixth finger. I don't want to see it.

00:34:17 - Anthony Campolo

Uncanny valley.

00:34:19 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

00:34:20 - Ebony Louis

First one was really, really cute. I wish it stuck with it.

00:34:23 - Rizel Scarlett

I know, it was cute. I like that one best. Let me bring it back up. Because the little Goose, it's like, hey.

00:34:34 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's cuter for sure.

00:34:36 - Ebony Louis

Perfect outline of the Goose with the little mic.

00:34:39 - Rizel Scarlett

Mm-hmm.

00:34:41 - Ebony Louis

Like a little intro into Goose. Are there any questions that we should address?

00:34:47 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, sure.

00:34:50 - Anthony Campolo

What do you all use it for in your own day-to-day stuff?

00:34:53 - Rizel Scarlett

Ooh, I'll let Ebony Louis talk because I've been talking a lot.

00:34:56 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I use it for different things. So I've been helping a lot internally with other teams, and I've been using it to brainstorm sometimes. Say another team wants to know, how could I use Goose to do X, Y, and Z? I always start with just, ask Goose. But then they're like, what do you mean, ask Goose how? And I'm like, let me show you. And then we'll come up with a plan together. So I use it that way.

I also use the Google Drive extension. So I'll have Goose create different docs and things for me. I've just tested out using the Google Calendar one where it will make meetings, and that's pretty cool. It's really tight.

00:35:35 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I've tried ChatGPT Operator. It can do the same thing, but it's like a whole drag-and-drop interface. You watch it move the mouse. It takes a long time, but it has connections to things like Docs and Calendar. So are there other integrations you use?

00:35:55 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, and then there's also Glean. If you scroll up a little bit, that one I've been using. That's internal for us, but it basically makes it an expert on all of our internal knowledge. Say you want to host an event or something at a Block space. You can literally ask it, hey, I'm trying to host this event. Who do I need to contact? What's the protocol? And it knows everything. Or you want to know about your stocks or something.

00:36:19 - Anthony Campolo

It has a Rag system trained on all of Block's data.

00:36:24 - Ebony Louis

Pretty much. It's really cool. Those are the ones that I also love using, plus the memory extension. So I built an MCP server, the Afterpay one. It's not public yet. Hopefully it will be soon. But say if I was doing a session with Goose and I had to stop for the night, I would say, okay, remember what we did that worked. Remember what we did that didn't work. Create a little checklist for tomorrow. And then I'd be able to just pick up on a new session, and it would just kind of have that little starting point for me. So that was really cool. Yeah, those are pretty much what I use Goose for.

00:36:54 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. I actually have a specific question for you, Ebony Louis, that's kind of adjacent to this. How has AI helped you as a junior engineer?

00:37:04 - Ebony Louis

Ooh, I think that's a good question. I feel like it's helped me a lot. When I think about AI now, outside of Block, just in general, I think back to when I first started. I was just a software engineer. I'm like, the amount of effort I put into Googling, trying to find different answers, being on Stack Overflow and stuff like that. I wish ChatGPT and these things were here then. They would have saved me so much debugging.

00:37:26 - Anthony Campolo

Oh my God, I identify with that so hard.

00:37:30 - Ebony Louis

I'm like, the engineers now have it. Obviously not easy, you still have to know all your knowledge and all that.

00:37:34 - Anthony Campolo

They have it easy.

00:37:35 - Ebony Louis

They've got it easy.

00:37:35 - Anthony Campolo

As hell.

00:37:37 - Ebony Louis

The pain of Googling, opening all these articles, you don't have to deal with that at all. I'm jealous, but it helped in that sense. It also helps me when I'm thinking of different titles. Sometimes the titles aren't that great, but when it comes to different live streams I'm having, I'll do content strategy debugging with it. That helps me. AI is literally—I use AI all the time, even outside of work.

00:38:02 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, same. I really like just dialoguing with it and asking questions and learning about different topics. Sometimes not even technical. I have long ridiculous historical threads that go on.

00:38:17 - Ebony Louis

Same. And I'm trying to get more active on TikTok. I'm like, create me a strategy where I'm going to be a TikTok star.

00:38:25 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, that's cute.

00:38:27 - Ebony Louis

It has this whole plan for me. I'm like, yep, I'll make that video tomorrow. I use AI for literally everything now.

00:38:35 - Anthony Campolo

That's awesome. Yeah, I got my wife into AI. She was a Yale grad. She went to Yale and studied English. So she was someone who came out and was like, AI writing? How could it ever write? And I was like, okay, just give it a try. And now she loves it. She uses it for work. She uses it to cook. She uses it for all sorts of stuff.

00:38:58 - Ebony Louis

Oh.

00:38:59 - Rizel Scarlett

You've got to give me the tips, because I do have people that are like—my friend's a professor, and she's like, I hate AI. All the students just submit AI papers. She's like, I can't believe you work with it. I'm like, here.

00:39:11 - Anthony Campolo

Here's what to tell her. Tell her that she can have AI read their papers and give her a first draft grade.

00:39:18 - Ebony Louis

Ooh.

00:39:21 - Anthony Campolo

They write the papers. It can also grade the papers.

00:39:27 - Rizel Scarlett

I love that, actually.

00:39:29 - Anthony Campolo

This is—I got that from—do you guys watch South Park at all?

00:39:34 - Rizel Scarlett

South Park?

00:39:35 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, South Park, the TV show.

00:39:36 - Rizel Scarlett

South Park, yeah.

00:39:40 - Anthony Campolo

So even if you don't like the show very much, you should watch the ChatGPT episode in particular. They have a really funny episode about ChatGPT. It's about two different things. One is about Stan and Wendy. They're kind of the main couple in the show. Wendy's mad at Stan because Clyde is sending all these really nice messages to his girlfriend, and Stan only thumbs up her texts all the time. He never responds, whereas her friends get these long, amazing romantic messages. And so Stan goes up to Clyde and he's like, how are you doing this, man? He's like, ChatGPT, bro. So he starts using ChatGPT to respond to all of his girlfriend's texts.

And then Mr. Garrison, the teacher, he's like, man, all the kids have all of a sudden started writing these really long, intricate, amazing essays. I don't know what's going on, but it takes me so long to grade them now.

[00:40:34] And his partner's like, have you heard about ChatGPT? And he's like, no. And he looks and he's like, oh my God, I could use this to grade the papers. He hasn't put together that they're using it to write the papers. He just is like, oh, I can use this to grade the papers.

00:40:50 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, that's smart. That's really smart.

00:40:54 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:40:55 - Ebony Louis

Oh my gosh.

00:40:56 - Anthony Campolo

So he got that event created.

00:40:58 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I did, but I was curious why it moved it. Oh, let me see. Because I told it to do 3:30. Let me see. And it says, since I didn't specify an end time, I'll set it for an hour, until 4:30. Okay. But then it did this. It did 5:30. The system adjusted the time zone. [00:41:25] - Anthony Campolo Learner, thanks for joining.

00:41:27 - Rizel Scarlett

Hey, Learner. I haven't seen you in a while.

00:41:31 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, they popped into my stream yesterday, too.

00:41:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh.

00:41:35 - Ebony Louis

Oh yeah. I put it to 4:30 to 5:30.

00:41:38 - Rizel Scarlett

You got it too. I don't know.

00:41:39 - Anthony Campolo

Why is it actually on your calendar, though? If you went to your Google Calendar, can you pull it up?

00:41:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Hopefully it's nothing personal, but I don't think so.

00:41:47 - Anthony Campolo

So when you first installed Goose and everything, you probably gave it your Gmail and had to connect it and go through a process with that, right?

00:41:55 - Rizel Scarlett

It was a quick OAuth, I think. We installed it, and then it just opened up and was like, "log in," and then...

00:42:03 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I wonder because I use Notion Calendar, which kind of has either Proton Calendar or Google Calendar on the back end. It's really confusing.

My calendar life is a total mess because I don't want to just use Google Calendar. I don't use Google products, and I've tried to remove Google from my life. It's literally impossible.

By the way, that's one of the reasons why I want to do it. It's the fact that it's impossible. It makes me mad, but it's really hard to get away from, so I'd be curious how it would work if I tried to do it with my Notion Calendar.

00:42:37 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. Maybe if there's a Notion Calendar server.

00:42:43 - Anthony Campolo

There probably is not, I would guess.

00:42:45 - Ebony Louis

There might.

00:42:45 - Anthony Campolo

There might be. It'll be a Notion integration, I bet.

00:42:49 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. They're not hard to... well, I shouldn't say that. I was going to say they're not hard to build. Ebony Louis built one, so she would be able to tell you.

00:42:57 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, there's an MCP for Notion, but it probably has the tool to access the calendar. Maybe. Let me read and see what it has.

00:43:08 - Rizel Scarlett

I could tell you while she's looking, the stuff I do with Goose in my day to day.

So our team does a lot of documentation, and people cringe when I say I use AI for documentation, but we have to document Goose and the features. The releases happen so fast. It's weekly, and they have a ton of them.

We have other stuff to do, like these podcasts. So I'll have Goose open up the Goose repository and I'll be like, "Tell me how this feature works," and then I'll start writing documentation on it. Then I'll be like, "Am I missing anything? I'll follow this format," stuff like that.

I wrote a blog post recently about this. It's really dumb, but I use it to close localhost servers or kill the ports because I have a problem with having a million open.

[00:44:01] I'll be at 3005 and I'm like, "I can't find it. I don't know what process it's on." I'm tired of that.

00:44:08 - Anthony Campolo

You need to get Open Ports, by the way. Google "Open Ports" right now and get it on your Mac. It's going to change your life. Trust me.

It's just a little menu thing where you can click it at the top of your menu and it'll show you everything running on all your ports. It's the best thing ever.

I like what you're saying about killing ports. For me, any sort of small terminal action that does something on your computer—Linux commands, all sorts of stuff—AI has helped with that for me so much.

00:44:38 - Rizel Scarlett

Right. Let me... I can't find the, oh, what is it you get? Signal port checker.

00:44:42 - Anthony Campolo

So do "Open Ports Mac OS app." Try that.

00:44:47 - Ebony Louis

(searching)

00:44:49 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Open Ports for macOS. That's what you want.

00:44:51 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

00:44:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I love this app. It's really good. You can see there in the preview; it shows you exactly what you're going to get. It's very, very simple.

00:44:59 - Rizel Scarlett

I need this because—Goose has been great. I just say, "Kill all the open Node.js ports or whatever," and then it does it.

00:45:08 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And you can kill ports through this as well. When you open them up, it shows you what's running. You can then just click it and say kill this port.

00:45:16 - Rizel Scarlett

Perfect. That's much easier. Thank you.

00:45:19 - Anthony Campolo

I just discovered that a couple months ago. I was like, "This is baller."

00:45:24 - Rizel Scarlett

Right? I do something similar. Anything that's a command I don't run every day, so I don't remember it, and I'm just too lazy to Google.

00:45:37 - Anthony Campolo

Quick regex stuff. If you want to do a quick regex, it's really great for that.

00:45:43 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. And then even the calendar thing—my plan is to, because I have to send out a couple of calendar invites to our team for our Discord support and Slack rotation.

I'm about to ask Goose to just do that. I'm about to just say, "Give Ebony Louis all the Mondays and Ace all the..." I'm so lazy now. I know it.

Sometimes I Google something and I'm like, in my head, "Why didn't Google just do it for me?" My brain is...

00:46:14 - Anthony Campolo

I don't even Google things anymore. I go to ChatGPT first for everything now.

00:46:19 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I feel like it's crazy because as a society, we're so impatient, and now it's just getting worse and worse with all this new technology. Google, just do it. It's crazy. It's so real.

Something long that I don't want to read, I'm like, "Can you summarize this?" It'll give me a paragraph. I'm like, "Can I get a sentence?" I just can't.

00:46:44 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't want to do all this. Oh my God, I do that so bad.

So I already use Gemini notes, and then I'll give Goose Gemini notes and I'll be like, "Can you tell me what we said about this particular thing?" Because I don't want to read the notes.

00:46:59 - Ebony Louis

No, literally I'm like, "I don't want to read this, please."

00:47:04 - Rizel Scarlett

Who gets paid to know exactly what we want to see? Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Dev, for justifying it.

00:47:10 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. That's literally their one job.

00:47:16 - Ebony Louis

Oh my goodness, that's great.

00:47:18 - Anthony Campolo

No, I love this. I love how much you two have really adopted AI just within your own lives and workflows.

I was telling this to so many people in 2023 because ChatGPT came out in November 2022. So the year of 2023—I think it was the first year of this being a thing—and there was widespread skepticism across my entire social network, across everyone I knew personally.

Almost no one that I knew, on the day when ChatGPT came out, was like, "ChatGPT. Amazing. This is gonna change my life." They're all like, "What is it? Why does anyone care? Why are you telling me about it? This sounds bad."

It took me a year of having to constantly say, "No, this is cool. Look, you could do this. No, this is cool. Look, you can do this," and having that conversation over and over and over with every single person in my life. Except my dad.

My dad, the most boomer person in my entire life, instantly was like, "ChatGPT, this is cool."

[00:48:18] I can talk to it about movies and stuff. And I'm like, "Yeah, my dad gets it. Why can't you get it?"

00:48:25 - Ebony Louis

Oh, that.

00:48:26 - Rizel Scarlett

That's funny that your dad was the one to pick it up.

00:48:30 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, he was the first person of anyone I know in my life or social network who naturally just got it and started playing around with it and had fun and thought it was cool and useful.

My dad has always been hip to tech. He was the reason there was a computer in my house. I was born in the early '90s, and we had a computer from as long as I could remember. So we had one probably at least in '93 or '94, somewhere around there.

So yeah. "Must feel familiar for a Web3 frog."

00:49:05 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

00:49:06 - Rizel Scarlett

What's that supposed to mean? All of us have done decentralized web things before, so.

00:49:15 - Anthony Campolo

Cool. What else would be useful for someone to know about Goose who's getting started, wanting to know how to get the most out of it?

00:49:26 - Rizel Scarlett

I think another thing is a few more features. Oh yeah, Recipes. Well, okay. Do you want to talk about Recipes, or do you want...

00:49:35 - Ebony Louis

...to do lots of this stuff.

00:49:36 - Rizel Scarlett

I was going to do autonomous and summarize. Just really simple, but recipes is a big one.

I was just going to quickly say sometimes people have a struggle adapting to agentic workflows because they're like, "I don't want an AI to do stuff for me." I was like that at first. When Goose came out, I was good with just ChatGPT suggesting things. I don't want it to actually do it.

So there are different modes you can use.

00:50:00 - Anthony Campolo

Trust. Your trust is involved.

00:50:02 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, exactly. You can either say autonomous—"do whatever"—or do manual, where it checks with you each time: "Do you want me to do this? Approve or deny."

00:50:12 - Anthony Campolo

That's how Warp has an agent built in that can suggest a command. Then you can say, "Okay, yes, run this command," and it will suggest another one. I like that.

00:50:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Cool. And then there's the "smart only" where it'll mostly run everything unless it figures out, "Oh, I need to remove all the folders or something." It'll be like, "Destructive action."

Then "chat only" doesn't make any action, just chats.

I think one thing people run into a lot is the context limits of LLMs. It's a real struggle for them. So they'll have a really long running session and they'll struggle with that. There's a little summarize button here. It'll summarize the conversation and shorten the content.

00:51:01 - Anthony Campolo

Like start a new session with the summary.

00:51:04 - Rizel Scarlett

Or you could stay within that session. So I think this shortened it from—oh, I didn't even show you. So maybe this right here: I've used only 3%. Damn, I want something.

00:51:13 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. That's cool. I like that it actually shows you what percentage of your context window you use, because this is definitely something that I think of as a pro tip that I always tell people: don't ever get into a really long conversation with an LLM. The longer you talk to it, the stupider it gets. And that's not an intuitive thing when you first start using them.

00:51:34 - Rizel Scarlett

Exactly. So there's lots of different tips to making it shorter, and that's one of them. Or you could just go to a new session and, like what Ebony Louis was saying, store the information in memory and then be like, "Remember I said this? What did I say?" [00:51:52] - Anthony Campolo Don't get into a long argument with your girl. The longer the argument goes on, the longer it goes on.

00:51:56 - Ebony Louis

Oh, okay.

00:51:58 - Rizel Scarlett

Third probably does feel that way about me. I just want to keep the argument going.

00:52:02 - Ebony Louis

You know what I hate? Arguments. When the argument's all done and the disagreement's over, whatever, then I'll be in the shower and think, "Wow, I should have said this." Then you're upset all over again. This would have been a really great thing to say.

00:52:16 - Rizel Scarlett

It gets me.

00:52:17 - Ebony Louis

Me too.

00:52:19 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm the same. I'll get pissed all over again. We already said sorry, and I'm like, "And you know another thing?"

00:52:27 - Ebony Louis

That this part doesn't make any sense.

00:52:32 - Rizel Scarlett

But I'll let Ebony Louis talk about recipes because I think that's one of the coolest parts.

00:52:38 - Ebony Louis

So we have this thing called Recipes. You're making an agent from your session, and this is how you can share your sessions with other people. Say you have a really good thing going and you're like, "Wait, this could be useful to somebody else or maybe another team member." You can create an agent that can be shared, and they'll have access to it.

Basically, there's a few things you can do. You can create instructions; that's what you have to create. It needs to define the agent's behavior and capabilities. And then you can also give it prompts, like in the beginning when Rizel opened up Goose and it had those little bubbles like "make a snake game" to help you get started. When you share an agent, a recipe, or a session, you can also put little prompts there for the person that's entering it so they know how to get started talking to the agent.

[00:53:27] And then you have different activities, those little bubbles. But then with the prompt, you can have an automatic prompt where the agent will just start getting into the workflow that you're sharing, or the user can start speaking to it. I think it's really powerful because, like I said, you can share your session, and they also have access to all the tools that you have open.

So say you created, I don't know, you automated some workflow with Goose and you used maybe three tools. When you share it with me or whoever through that link, I'll have access to all those tools as well in that exact session.

00:53:59 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. The next release is coming out with scheduling, or you can run them on a cron job. I'm waiting for that. I really want it.

00:54:12 - Ebony Louis

Okay.

00:54:16 - Anthony Campolo

Goose is really doing a lot in terms of bringing together everything that MCP is actually promising, but is not entirely delivering by itself. Not that it's... let me rephrase that.

MCP, well, no, it's not what I mean though, because what Goose does wouldn't be possible without MCP also. So the promise of MCP is that it connects everything and creates this integrated thing that lets everything talk to everything. But it's at the point now where, because it's so new, it's not clear how you actually use it. How do you get the right MCP servers and clients? How do you connect those together?

Whereas Goose does all that for you. So Goose does that last part where it actually brings together all the MCP servers to do useful stuff for you, which unless you're a developer right now, you can't really do without coding a whole bunch of stuff to connect MCP servers together. So that's what I'm getting right now, that all the stuff that people are telling me I can do with MCP, but I find actually very challenging.

[00:55:20] You can do it in seconds with Goose. So I say Goose is awesome.

00:55:26 - Rizel Scarlett

I'm glad that's the takeaway. Another thing.

00:55:30 - Ebony Louis

What were you saying? MCP registry.

00:55:31 - Anthony Campolo

The registry will be big.

00:55:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I think our team is working on that. Not our particular team, but people within Block. They're working on that with GitHub. You were saying something.

00:55:42 - Ebony Louis

I was, but it's gone now. All right.

00:55:49 - Anthony Campolo

But it was probably created before MCP was even released.

00:55:53 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

00:55:54 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, that's true.

00:55:57 - Ebony Louis

We got excited about the ability of MCP. We were like, "Oh shoot, this is going to be like Super Goose."

00:56:03 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, we contributed to the spec and we were like, "Let's build the MCP client." We had a Pi; it was built on Python. Then we were like, "Let's move this to Rust and make it cool and everything."

00:56:21 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, this is dope. I saw there's actually also a Google Maps extension, because that's one of the things. Getting all the Google stuff will be useful because one thing I like doing is looking for restaurants in the area, and I can give it an address and have it check places in a three-mile radius, those kinds of things.

So that's something I'm looking at, what other stuff Goose connects to. And I'm like, "Oh, that could be a fun thing for me to try out." So yeah, this is awesome. I'm super into this.

00:56:51 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. A website that I go to when I want to look for new MCP servers is Glamour AI. I just shared it in our private chat. I'm not able to comment on that one. I'm not sure. But that's where I look.

When I want to pick a new server to play around with, I'll go on there. So it has the little report cards and stuff. Oh, nice.

00:57:09 - Anthony Campolo

Oh yeah. I did not know about this. Thank you for sharing it.

00:57:12 - Ebony Louis

Oh, great. This is a great directory. If you want to test out different MCP servers, and as Goose is an MCP client, all of these should work fine with Goose. But what I really like is the report card there, with the greens across.

What they do is the heavy lifting of making sure it's safe. Obviously, still do your own due diligence and make sure that the server is safe, but this is a good leg up. Whenever any new code gets pushed to the GitHub repo, they rerun these tests to make sure it actually works, that it does what it says it's going to do and nothing more than that, and then what kind of licensing does it have. So this is one of my favorite directories.

00:57:49 - Anthony Campolo

And then generally, are there other resources for MCP? If you want a recommendation, I would start with the Dev stream we just did.

00:58:01 - Anthony Campolo

Drop a link to that.

00:58:04 - Ebony Louis

We also have a lot on YouTube. We have what we call plug and play shorts, where you could look up different tutorials on how to access different MCP servers. So that could be a good resource.

But did you want to learn how to make an MCP server? What exactly did you want to learn about MCP? That might be easier for me to then point you in the right direction.

00:58:25 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, this is a question from Learner. So if you want to be a bit more specific, Learner, we can point you in the right direction.

00:58:33 - Anthony Campolo

Your laptop is dying. Oh no.

00:58:35 - Rizel Scarlett

I came back. In between, she was talking. I grabbed the charger and everything.

00:58:41 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I disappeared.

00:58:44 - Rizel Scarlett

I was like, "Oh my gosh, it's dying. It's at 1%. That's going to be so bad."

00:58:52 - Ebony Louis

I'm going to link to all of our tutorials.

00:58:56 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, yeah.

00:58:57 - Ebony Louis

I'll do that. They cover different MCP servers to get you guys started if you want to jump right into different ones. We have so many right now.

00:59:05 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I'm looking at just the top weekly downloads on Glamour. There's a lot called just "fetch MCP server" that are basically just letting you fetch web content.

00:59:18 - Anthony Campolo

There are a lot of Playwright too.

00:59:21 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, we have tutorials on Fetch and Playwright.

00:59:28 - Anthony Campolo

Building is certainly one thing, but not just yet. Start from the basics and then move up to building your own.

00:59:34 - Ebony Louis

Thank you. There's a blog that I can also share that explains MCP and the ecosystem and what's going on. And it's a visual guide that I think is a good starting point. I'll share that in our chat.

00:59:47 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, that was a good one that you wrote.

00:59:49 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, I like that one.

00:59:52 - Rizel Scarlett

Well, I can't spell "visual." There you go.

00:59:59 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, but I like Block. Block has always had good docs. Last time you were on, Rizel, we were going through Block's docs.

01:00:06 - [unclear]

It's our team.

01:00:07 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

01:00:08 - [unclear]

Thank you.

01:00:10 - Anthony Campolo

No, I really like what Block does. I've been very impressed every time I've seen this stuff. Y'all are killing it.

01:00:18 - Ebony Louis

That's good to hear.

01:00:19 - [unclear]

Thank you. Cool.

01:00:23 - Rizel Scarlett

I don't know if I have anything else.

01:00:25 - Anthony Campolo

Let's just freestyle. Anything else in AI you're interested in? Other projects, doesn't have to be related to Goose at all.

01:00:37 - Ebony Louis

Are there projects I'm interested in?

01:00:41 - Ebony Louis

Not that I can think of. I feel so bad saying that out loud.

01:00:45 - Anthony Campolo

No, it's cool. It sounds like you like Cursor.

01:00:47 - Anthony Campolo

Sorry.

01:00:49 - [unclear]

Yeah, okay.

01:00:50 - Rizel Scarlett

But I like Goose better.

01:00:55 - Anthony Campolo

No, I mean, you're in a place where you get to work on a tool that is both exciting and personally useful. So you actually get to use the thing. It's a really good place to be in as a DevRel because you're being honest.

There are so many DevRel, and I've been one of them, who have gone out and tried to advocate for a tool you don't even think is very good. [01:01:19] - [unclear] Yeah.

01:01:20 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, I agree. I used to get into different AI tools, and then Goose kept getting better and better, so I started contributing. Then I thought, you know, I'm gonna stick here.

01:01:32 - Anthony Campolo

And it provides the interface into a lot of the new tools because of all the stuff it can do, just what you showed me today. If you wanted to try something out, 11 Labs is a good example. Is that another one I saw you had a tutorial for?

01:01:45 - Rizel Scarlett

On that short by Ebony Louis. So 11 Labs is so good. I wish I could play it, but the sound wouldn't come out.

01:01:54 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. I've been getting into text-to-speech for two reasons, totally separate from each other.

I really like it now because we can generate all this text. I can create my own audiobook. Essentially, I use deep research and have it give me a report, then I turn it into audio. It can be one to two hours in length because it will write really well-written, lengthy answers.

Then I'm like, okay, ChatGPT just wrote me this epic report that's 20 pages. I don't have the time to sit down and read it, but I can listen to it and bring it into my podcast listening flow. So I'm getting into text-to-speech for that reason.

Also, I have a friend who's my best friend. We were in a band together back in college, and he started writing scripts because he works for his family's farming machinery company in central California. He created a sci-fi show where all his family members are characters in the show, and they work on a ship. It's kind of like his family's business, but in a sci-fi setting.

[01:03:03] So anyway, he was telling me about it, and I'm like, dude, we could turn this into an actual show with AI now. The technology exists, and it would cost millions of dollars to make a TV show like that just a year or two ago.

But the voices are the hardest part because the characters have to sound interesting. They have to sound like they have personality. They have emotion, and that's still really hard to do. So I'm trying to get into more text-to-speech stuff to figure out how you get that last extra mile of creating an actual useful voice track that you could put in a show.

01:03:40 - [unclear]

Yeah.

01:03:41 - Rizel Scarlett

Ebony Louis, the ones you did—I mean, I never used 11 Labs MCP, but they had emotion to me. It's such a cute short because she starts off talking and she's like, what if you could have AI? Then the AI takes over the script, and then she brings another AI, and he's like, wait, we're already doing that? It's funny. They had emotion to me.

01:04:03 - Anthony Campolo

So can you drop a link to that in the private chat, and I'll share it?

01:04:06 - Ebony Louis

I think—oh, did I? No, I didn't think I shared something.

01:04:09 - [unclear]

Yeah.

01:04:09 - Anthony Campolo

You dropped a bunch of block docs, which I'm now opening.

01:04:12 - [unclear]

Oh, so.

01:04:13 - Ebony Louis

At the top of those docs, you can actually access the short. There's a little—let me go to it.

01:04:18 - Rizel Scarlett

I'll show you the screen here.

01:04:21 - Ebony Louis

Click okay.

01:04:23 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. So within the tutorial, there's the demo right here.

01:04:29 - Ebony Louis

Let me share the link for it. 11 Labs. Here it is.

01:04:35 - Ebony Louis

Where are we? I've lost this.

01:04:37 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. This is a lot of links today. I'm just gonna open up my YouTube and drop all these in the YouTube description, so they'll be here after the fact as well.

01:04:48 - Ebony Louis

All right.

01:04:49 - Ebony Louis

I shared the YouTube link directly to it. So yeah, I think just about all of our tutorials, you'll find a little YouTube short at the top.

01:04:59 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

01:04:59 - Ebony Louis

Demonstrating it.

01:05:04 - Anthony Campolo

How many people do you have in DevRel at Block?

01:05:07 - Rizel Scarlett

Our team kind of grew recently.

01:05:11 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

01:05:11 - Ebony Louis

What is it?

01:05:13 - Rizel Scarlett

How many? I don't know. Me, you, Angie. Oh, sorry, I just counted you twice.

01:05:20 - Ebony Louis

Okay. Angie.

01:05:30 - Ebony Louis

Eight. Seven.

01:05:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah. Maybe. Did you count Jordan? There are some others.

01:05:36 - Ebony Louis

No, I didn't.

01:05:38 - Rizel Scarlett

It's like 12. Yeah, that's our open source.

01:05:43 - Ebony Louis

Yeah.

01:05:44 - Anthony Campolo

Are you hiring?

01:05:48 - Ebony Louis

Let's look. Let's go on Block's site. [01:05:51] - Ebony Louis Yeah. What are our open positions? Let's see. Careers.

01:06:03 - Ebony Louis

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of stuff open, but for DevRel, I don't think so.

01:06:07 - Ebony Louis

Let's see. It's definitely not for DevRel.

01:06:11 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, we have almost too much.

01:06:14 - Anthony Campolo

Maybe. Sirens just went off in my town.

01:06:18 - Ebony Louis

Oh, no.

01:06:19 - Anthony Campolo

That's okay. We had, I don't know if you heard about the crazy tornadoes that hit like 2 or 3 weeks ago.

01:06:25 - Ebony Louis

No.

01:06:26 - Anthony Campolo

Fucked up one of my friend's houses, but they're okay.

01:06:30 - Ebony Louis

Okay, that's good. I'm glad they're okay.

This was so fun, Anthony. Thank you for having us.

01:06:39 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I love this. Happy to have you back on anytime. Any final parting words or things you want to share?

And yeah, I'm totally safe, Learner. Don't worry.

01:06:51 - Rizel Scarlett

Try Goose. I'm just kidding. Thank you for having us, Anthony. Those are my final words.

Sorry. Go ahead, Ebony Louis.

01:06:58 - Ebony Louis

Download Goose now. Well, yeah, same sentiment. Thank you for having us.

This was a really fun talk. I enjoyed it. Yeah, and thank you, audience. You guys are great too.

01:07:09 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, thanks, Learner. Thanks, Dev. We had some other people earlier. Tortoises. Sweet. Cool.

And then something that I do, I run all these AutoShows. So I'll share with you guys the summary of the stream we just did in like an hour or two.

01:07:26 - Ebony Louis

Yeah. Love that. Perfect.

01:07:29 - Anthony Campolo

All right, cool. And then why don't you just both share your socials, like for your individual accounts?

01:07:33 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

01:07:35 - Ebony Louis

Mine is... Okay, sorry.

01:07:39 - Rizel Scarlett

I keep talking over you. BlackGirlBytes.

01:07:42 - Ebony Louis

Okay, mine is just Ebony Louis or Ebony Louis. That's where you'll find me. My government name.

01:07:53 - Anthony Campolo

Like on X?

01:07:55 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, well, actually, I think it's Ebony Louis on X, but let me share... Oh.

01:08:01 - Anthony Campolo

There we go. Okay, yeah, because I wasn't originally following you and I first found your LinkedIn.

So now I got you on X. Cool.

01:08:08 - Ebony Louis

Yeah, Jay Lewis, Ebony Louis. Cool.

01:08:10 - Anthony Campolo

And then let me just drop these into the YouTube description.

01:08:13 - Ebony Louis

Am I seeing you at CDC?

01:08:16 - Rizel Scarlett

No.

01:08:18 - Anthony Campolo

KC, DC.

01:08:20 - Rizel Scarlett

Kansas City Developer Conference.

01:08:21 - Anthony Campolo

No, no. When is it? I know what it is. I live in Saint Louis.

It's the only conference I could actually feasibly go to, so it might be. When is it?

01:08:30 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah, Dev, you tell us. I didn't apply to that many conferences because my...

01:08:35 - Anthony Campolo

It looks like it's in August.

01:08:37 - Rizel Scarlett

Oh, okay.

01:08:38 - Anthony Campolo

August 14th to 15th.

01:08:39 - Rizel Scarlett

Okay, cool. Yeah.

All I know is every time I go there, it's super hot and I'm sweating.

01:08:44 - Ebony Louis

Oh, no.

01:08:45 - Rizel Scarlett

Yeah.

01:08:46 - Anthony Campolo

The Midwest is hot as... Yeah, hot as crap. So which of you are going to be there?

01:08:53 - Rizel Scarlett

No, I usually go. Okay, yeah, none of us.

I recently had a baby, and I just didn't apply to stuff.

01:09:00 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I was seeing that. Congrats also. Thank you.

Yeah, cool. Okay, yeah, we can probably close up here then. Sweet. This is super fun. Thanks, everyone, for watching, and we will catch you all next time.

01:09:15 - Rizel Scarlett

Thanks.

01:09:15 - Ebony Louis

Bye-bye.