Follow up Goose upstream updates: non-root rules written to inert .goose/memories and skills emit legacy path

[dyoshikawa]

Summary

Two Goose rule/skill surfaces diverge from current upstream: rulesync routes non-root rules to .goose/memories/, a directory Goose does not load as session context, and the skills adapter emits the legacy .goose/skills/ path rather than the now-recommended .agents/skills/.

Recent Releases

• block/goose releases reviewed through v1.38.0 (2026-06-17): https://github.com/block/goose/releases
• Hints / context engineering: https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-goosehints/
• Skills: https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-skills/ (v1.38.0 changelog #9088 "Install plugins to ~/.agents/plugins")

Gaps

• rules — non-root rules written to a non-context directory. rulesync routes detail/scoped rules to .goose/memories/*.md (confirmed in dry-run). Goose's hints doc states nested context is loaded only from nested .goosehints / AGENTS.md files (or CONTEXT_FILE_NAMES); .goose/memories/ is the separate Memory extension's storage and is not auto-loaded as context. Effect: rulesync-generated non-root rules are effectively invisible to Goose at session start. (rules is otherwise project + global.) Source: https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-goosehints/
• skills — emits the deprecated/backward-compat path. Upstream now names .agents/skills/ (project) and ~/.agents/skills/ (global) as the recommended standard, with .goose/skills/ (and .claude/skills/) discovered only "for backward compatibility." rulesync's goose target writes legacy .goose/skills/ and throws on --global (delegating ~/.agents/skills/ to the agentsskills target). Severity: low — still functional via back-compat, global covered by agentsskills. Source: https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-skills/

Proposed Follow-up

• For non-root rules, emit nested .goosehints files in the corresponding subdirectories (Goose's hierarchical loader) or inline them into the root .goosehints/AGENTS.md, instead of .goose/memories/. Validate goose-rule.ts's nonRoot path against the current hints doc.
• Consider migrating the goose skill output to .agents/skills/, or document that agentsskills is the canonical Goose skill target so users land on the recommended location.

Not gaps: MCP and permissions being global-only matches upstream (only ~/.config/goose/config.yaml and ~/.config/goose/permission.yaml exist); hooks (all 11 events) and recipes/commands/subagents are in sync.

References

• https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-goosehints/ — nested-hints loading rules; basis for the .goose/memories non-context finding.
• https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/context-engineering/using-skills/ — .agents/skills/ now recommended over legacy .goose/skills/.
• https://goose-docs.ai/docs/guides/config-files/ — confirms MCP/permissions are global-only (why those stay as-is).