Google's answer to spec drift: elephants draft, goldfish attack

What it does

Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) is a plugin for spec-driven development with AI coding agents, built at Google (though explicitly not an officially supported Google product). Deep-context “Elephant” sessions draft design specifications, then isolated zero-context “Goldfish” subagents tear those specs apart from conflicting perspectives before you write a line of code. The output is a verified design doc under docs/designs/ that you implement against.

The interesting bit

The Goldfish reviewers are deliberately stateless — they see only the draft spec and live source code, with no conversational history, so they can’t be charmed into agreeing with the drafter. The swarm runs personas like Design Critic, Naive Reader, Tech Lead, and Codebase Auditor through a staged pipeline (Zoom Out → Comprehension → Critic → Readiness). There’s also a drift report that AST-scans your codebase to catch divergence between checked-in specs and reality — the boring maintenance step most spec workflows quietly abandon.

Key highlights

• Works across harnesses: Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and a generic “ask your agent to install it” path.
• Seven skills covering the full lifecycle: brainstorm, draft, review, review-loop, resolve, drift-report, and bootstrap (recursive codebase documentation).
• Human stays the decision-maker — the README is explicit that AI is an exploration partner and auditor, not the owner of outcomes.
• Apache 2.0, with a foundational essay by Dave Rensin linked for the methodology-curious.

Caveats

• It’s a prompt-and-orchestration layer, not software in the traditional sense — the value lives entirely in the skill definitions and agent personas.
• The README doesn’t quantify how well the Goldfish swarm actually catches design flaws, so treat the stress-testing claims as methodology, not measured results.

Verdict

Worth a look if you already use Claude Code or Codex and want structure between “vibe-coded” and “over-engineered.” If you don’t buy spec-driven development in the first place, a swarm of goldfish won’t change your mind.