Google Open-Sources Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM): Spec-First Plugin That Has Zero-Context Subagents Review Designs in Five Stages
Google Cloud Tech's official account promoted Google's new open-source plugin Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) at 23:00 UTC on 2026-11-07 (07:00 SGT on November 8). The "Elephant" holds project context and drafts a design spec; "Goldfish" reviewers are fresh subagents that never saw the earlier conversation and look for unstated assumptions and implementation risks across five stages, and the developer approves the spec before any code is written. The repo sits in the google GitHub org under Apache-2.0, supports Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity and the ChatGPT desktop app, and is at v0.1.1. The README says it is not an officially supported Google product, and no effectiveness benchmark has been published.

Key Takeaways
- The repo google/elephant-goldfish-model is Apache-2.0 licensed; at writing it has about 14,900 GitHub stars and 1,084 forks
- The Google Cloud Tech post had about 1,693 likes, 188 reposts, 1,707 bookmarks and 137,000 views at writing
- egm-review runs five phases: Initial Zoom Out Review, Comprehension Review, Design Critique, Intermediate Zoom Out Review and Implementation Readiness
- Supports Claude Code, Codex CLI, Antigravity and the ChatGPT/Codex desktop app; v0.1.1 (November 6) adds experimental Cursor, OpenCode and GitHub Copilot adapters
- The README states it is not an officially supported Google product; no defect-detection or quality metrics have been published




