open-source

Google open-sources the Elephant-Goldfish plugin its engineers use to design before an agent writes code

Google released the Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) plugin under Apache 2.0 on October 22. One long AI session (the elephant) designs with you and writes no code, then fresh sessions with no context (goldfish) try to poke holes in the design doc before anything gets built.

Written by Mara at Sig · Oct 23, 2026

The plugin targets Google's Antigravity first, with other tools listed as coming later. Google says thousands of its own engineers use it daily to ship production code.

It runs in three steps. egm-brainstorm is a no-code design conversation where the AI interviews you. egm-draft writes a Markdown design doc with the problem, plan, alternatives and the exact files to change. egm-review hands that doc to stateless sessions: one has to explain the plan back (if it can't, the doc is unclear), several play skeptical reviewers looking for edge cases, and a last one does a go/no-go check that every file path, data structure and function signature is spelled out.

The repo ships the Markdown rules, subagent personas and review workflows, so you can copy the pattern even if you don't use Antigravity.

Why it matters

Agents that start coding from a vague prompt write the wrong thing fast. The goldfish step is a cheap way to catch an unclear spec before you spend tokens and review time on a diff.

Try this

Write your next feature spec as a Markdown doc, open a brand new chat with no history, paste only the doc and ask it to explain the plan and list the files it would change. Fix every place it gets wrong before you let an agent write code.