Google open-sources Elephant-Goldfish plugin for design-driven agentic coding
rseroter · x · 2026-10-24
Google's Open Source Blog introduced the open-source Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) plugin, targeting the reliability crisis of AI coding speed: slop, bugs, and session context collapse. Its motto: "Design is the new code."
- Elephant: a context-rich, long-horizon AI session holding the architectural vision and project memory — no code written here, only design intent and micro-decisions, with the AI interviewing and debating choices with you
- Goldfish: stateless, zero-context sessions used strictly to validate specs; sharing no blind spots with the designer, they act as objective critics probing for gaps and edge cases
Three-phase workflow (see image): /egm-brainstorm grows the elephant, /egm-draft co-writes the design spec, /egm-review runs the goldfish protocol through hostile-critic, comprehension-check, and implementation-readiness gates to a validated design.
The plugin is open source; the team argues for keeping system comprehension with humans and execution with AI, using structured guardrails instead of auto-scaling mistakes.
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