Our take
Newless than six months old and changing fast- Activity
- 65
- Community
- 51
- Issues
- 80
- Pull requests
- 79
- Merges more pull requests than 86% of the projects we track
EGM offers a focused design-before-code workflow, and its recent activity is encouraging, but its review process depends on agent environments that can create fresh subagents.
Good fit if
- Your team uses Antigravity, Claude Code, or Codex and wants an agent-assisted process for specifications and independent review.
- You can provide human judgment for design decisions and use tests alongside reviews, rather than treating agent feedback as verification.
- You are comfortable evaluating a new, fast-changing project with recent development and an initial release.
Look elsewhere if
- Your agent environment cannot create fresh subagents, which EGM requires for brainstorming and review.
- You need an officially supported Google product. The repository says EGM is not one.
- Your task is a small, clear bug fix that does not need design decisions.
All health signals
| Last commit | 2026-10-30 (2 days ago) |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 90 days | 100+ |
| Releases, last 12 months | 1 (latest v0.1.0, 2026-10-27) |
| Contributors | 20 (top contributor: 65% of commits) |
| Issues closed, last 90 days | 23+ (typically closed in 1 day) |
| Pull requests merged, last 90 days | 78 (typically merged in 0 days) |
| Project age | 49 days |
Checked on 2026-11-01 with the GitHub API.
Project history
Daily GitHub snapshots since Nov 2, 2026. History covers stars and forks; health signals are not tracked historically.
Stars
9,079Forks
586More snapshots will appear as the daily collection continues.
Overview
Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) is an open-source plugin for Antigravity, Claude Code, Codex, and other documented coding-agent environments. It helps teams make design decisions before implementation: an agent uses project context to explore a feature and draft a specification, while fresh subagents review the document and its referenced source material without the earlier conversation.
That separation aims to surface missing assumptions, unclear requirements, and implementation risks before code is written. EGM is for work that needs design discussion, not a replacement for a normal workflow on small, clear bug fixes. People remain responsible for trade-offs and approval.
Key Features
- Brainstorm requirements and trade-offs, then save an agreed concept brief.
- Draft a design specification from a brief or existing notes, with opportunities for feedback between sections.
- Review designs using fresh subagents that do not inherit the earlier conversation.
- Run review stages that assess the design, its clarity, its fit with the code, and its implementation plan.
- Resolve review findings and agree on changes.
- Bootstrap documentation for an existing codebase and report drift between checked-in documents and source code.
- Install the plugin for Antigravity, Claude Code, and Codex, with setup guidance for other environments.
Use Cases
- A product or engineering team planning a feature with unresolved requirements can use brainstorming to explore trade-offs before committing to a design.
- An engineer preparing a specification can use fresh reviewers to look for assumptions the drafting conversation may have left unstated.
- A team maintaining a mature codebase can bootstrap documentation or check whether existing documents still match the source.
- A project using supported coding agents can adopt the skills individually, rather than requiring the full brainstorm-to-review sequence.
What you need
Detected in the repository
- Python (from pyproject.toml)
- A test suite and automated checks on GitHub Actions
License in plain words
Apache-2.0permissive
- Commercial use: yes
- Modify and redistribute: yes
- You must keep: the license, the NOTICE file and a note of your changes
- Share your changes: no
- Includes an explicit patent grant from the contributors:
A summary, not legal advice: the LICENSE file is what applies.
Getting Started
For Antigravity CLI, install the plugin with:
agy plugin install https://github.com/google/elephant-goldfish-model
See the README and setup guide for Claude Code, Codex, and other environments.
Alternatives
- get-shit-done: GSD structures spec-driven development into planning and execution workflows, while Elephant-Goldfish centers on context-rich spec drafting and independent review.
| Project | Language | License | Stars | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| elephant-goldfish-model | Python | Apache-2.0 | 8.8k | New |
| get-shit-done | JavaScript | MIT | 64.2k | Archived |
Considerations
EGM is new and changing quickly, so teams should validate its workflow and supported harnesses in their own environment. Fresh subagent contexts are required for brainstorming and review; if an agent cannot create them, the review stops. The project also states that reviews do not replace tests or human judgment, and it is not an officially supported Google product. It uses Python and has CI and tests; the supplied requirements list no Docker or database dependency.
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