Jon Iler

Google just open-sourced the plugin thousands of its engineers use every day to stop AI from shipping sloppy code. It's called the Elephant-Goldfish Model. No code until the plan survives. No AI grading its own homework. No context collapse halfway through a feature. The idea is simple and kind of brilliant. The Elephant is one long-running AI session that remembers everything: the architecture, the intent, every small decision. It writes zero code. It interviews you, argues with you, and keeps the record. The Goldfish are fresh AI sessions with no memory at all. They never saw your design conversation, so they don't inherit its blind spots. Here's how it works: → egm-brainstorm: you and the Elephant debate options under a strict no-code rule → egm-draft: you produce a Markdown design doc with the problem, the plan, the alternatives, and the exact files to change → egm-review: one Goldfish has to explain the design back. If it gets it wrong, the doc is ambiguous and goes back for redrafting → Then several Goldfish attack it as hostile reviewers hunting edge cases, hidden dependencies and logic gaps → A final Goldfish makes the go/no-go call: are file paths, data structures and function signatures all present and unambiguous? Here's why this matters: Google's team says AI made coding faster but also sped up slop, bugs and session context collapse. Speed without guardrails just scales your mistakes. This flips the order. The design gets attacked before a single line exists. Here's the wildest part: This isn't a research demo. Google says thousands of Googlers run it daily to ship production code. The repo ships the Markdown rules, the reviewer personas and the review workflows. Free, Apache 2.0. The honest trade-off: it only runs inside Antigravity for now, with other environments coming. And security isn't on the default reviewer list. You'd add your own security Goldfish. github.com/google/elephant-g…