I tried a Claude Code rival that's local, open source, and completely free - how it went

I was curious if Block's Goose agent, paired with Ollama and the Qwen3-coder model, could really replace Claude Code. Here's how it worked.

So yeah, I vibe-coded a log colorizer—and I feel good about it

Oh, sure, I can “code.” That is, I can flail my way through a block of (relatively simple) pseudocode and follow the flow. I ...