Google has open-sourced the Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) plugin, a design-and-review layer for AI coding agents. The Elephant-Goldfish Model plugin makes an agent write a specification before it writes code. Fresh subagents with no conversation history then attack that spec. Google says thousands of its engineers use it. It is quite simple: catch wrong assumptions in a Markdown file, not in a pull request.
EGM is an Apache 2.0 plugin of skills, reviewer personas and document standards. It is not a new language model. The method comes from Dave Rensin’s essay on elephants and goldfish. The Google Open Source blog frames it as a fix for AI “slop” and session context collapse. The README states it is not an officially supported Google product.
The Elephant is a long session holding project context and earlier decisions. It drafts the spec and writes no code. Each Goldfish is a stateless subagent. It reads only the draft and the files it references. You resolve trade-offs and approve the design.
/egm-drift-report later compares code with the spec. The docs recommend running it weekly.
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