Via sunrisegeek.com
The fintech giant behind Square and Cash App releases a consolidated desktop tool for wrangling AI agents, built on its Goose framework
Block just dropped another piece of its AI toolkit into the open. Berd, a native desktop application designed to give teams a single interface for managing AI agents, files, skills, and sessions, is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.
The app was originally built for Block’s internal teams. Now anyone can grab it, run it, and see how a $40B+ fintech company organizes its AI workflow. Though “anyone can grab it” comes with a caveat: external pull requests are not accepted, so this is more of a “look and use” situation than a true community project.
What Berd actually does #
The app is built on Tauri 2 and React 19, which means it’s a lightweight native application rather than another bloated Electron wrapper eating your RAM for breakfast. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Under the hood, Berd connects to Block’s Goose AI agent framework through ACP WebSocket. Goose is the real engine here. Berd is essentially the dashboard you use to drive it.
For context, Goose launched on January 28, 2025, and has since accumulated more than 45,000 GitHub stars with over 500 contributors. The framework supports more than 15 LLM providers and over 70 MCP extensions, making it one of the more versatile open-source AI agent platforms available.
Block’s growing AI toolkit #
Berd isn’t Block’s first open-source AI release this year, and it likely won’t be the last. In July 2026, the company launched Buzz, another open-source platform focused on integrating human and AI cooperation in workflows.
If Goose is the agent framework and Berd is the management interface, Buzz appears to target the collaboration layer, the part where humans and AI agents need to hand work back and forth without everything falling apart. That said, Block hasn’t exactly turned this into a community barn-raising. The no-external-pull-requests policy means the company retains tight control over the codebase. You can fork it, modify it, deploy it internally, but you can’t contribute back upstream. It’s open source in license, corporate in governance.
Why desktop apps for AI management #
The Tauri 2 framework, which Berd uses, is significantly lighter than Electron-based alternatives. Where an Electron app bundles an entire Chromium browser, Tauri leverages the operating system’s native web renderer. The result is smaller binaries and lower memory usage.
React 19 on the frontend keeps things familiar for the massive pool of JavaScript developers who might want to customize their installation. Block may not accept outside pull requests on the main repo, but the Apache 2.0 license means forking is fair game.
The commit activity around August 11 through 18, 2026, indicates active development, which means the project hasn’t been tossed over the wall in a “here, you deal with it” fashion.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our