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

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

Beyond Syntax: How Do LLMs Understand Code?

Abstract: Within software engineering research, Large Language Models (LLMs) are often treated as ‘black boxes’, with only their inputs and outputs being considered. In this paper, we take a machine ...