Google engineers open-source EGM agent dev workflow

On October 27, 2026, a Google employee posted on DEV Community describing Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM), an open-source workflow for building software with AI agents that they have been developing with a small group at Google. According to the author, the workflow starts from a feature you want to build and helps you talk the idea through, write a design document, get independent reviews, and work through the findings. As you build, it can also check where the code has drifted from the design. The author explains the motivation behind it: a long conversation with a coding agent can make a plan feel settled, because the agent already knows what you meant, but a fresh reviewer still has to understand what you actually wrote. To address this, the agent that helps you draft keeps your project context, while separate reviewers read the design and relevant materials before giving their feedback.

The author states that thousands of Googlers already use EGM. No benchmark results or evaluation data were provided in the post. No further coverage of the project has appeared since, so the current picture rests on the author's own account, with both the adoption figure and the absence of benchmarks remaining unverified.