rota vs the Elephant-Goldfish Model
The Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM) is a plugin of skills and reviewer prompts for spec-driven design. The “elephant” is the main agent, which holds the project context and drafts the design; the “goldfish” are reviewers that run as fresh subagents and see only the document and the source it cites. It comes from Google engineers and is Apache-2.0, but its README says it “is not an officially supported Google product.” It has no tagged releases. Checked 2026-11-13 against commit 964a4f1 (2026-11-13) and rota 0.34.2.
The short version
- Pick EGM when the risk is a design nobody challenged: you want an idea stress-tested, a design written section by section, and reviews from agents that never saw how it was argued.
- Pick rota when the design is settled enough to file as issues and you want them built, verified and merged, possibly in parallel.
- They barely overlap. EGM ends at an approved design doc and tells you to “ask your coding agent to implement it”; rota starts there.
Side by side
| EGM | rota | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A plugin of skills (egm-*), reviewer personas and review rubrics |
A Go binary plus /rota-* skills |
| Unit of work | A design doc in docs/designs/<feature>.md |
A backlog item or tracker issue |
| Core loop | egm-brainstorm, egm-draft, egm-review, egm-resolve; also egm-review-loop, egm-bootstrap, egm-drift-report |
/rota-capture, /rota-work, /rota-ship; rounds for parallel work |
| Review | Up to five stages (zoom out, comprehension, critic, zoom out again, implementation readiness), each by fresh-context reviewers; a synthesizer merges their findings. Refuses to run without subagent support | /rota-review runs Spec and Standards reviewers in fresh context on the diff; a plan critic reviews plans |
| Implementation | Not covered. The approved design lists every file to change, and you hand it to your agent | /rota-work or a round worker, with red and green proof |
| Parallel agents | Parallel reviewers only | An orchestrator plus two to five standing workers |
| Isolation, merging | Not documented | One worktree per worker; the gate merges after test.full passes on a scratch merge |
| Backlog / tracker | None | .rota/BACKLOG.md, GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear or It’s a Plan |
| Memory across sessions | Design docs, an optional SITEMAP.md index, generated READMEs |
KNOWLEDGE.md, DECISIONS.md and handoff notes in .rota/ |
| Agents | Verified on Claude Code, Codex and the Antigravity CLI; others listed as working or experimental | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode |
| Install | claude plugin marketplace add google/elephant-goldfish-model, then claude plugin install egm@egm; similar for Codex and agy |
brew install l4ci/tap/rota or install.sh, then rota skills install and rota setup |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
Where EGM is stronger
- Design review depth. Ten reviewer slots across five stages, each with its own rubric, then a structured pass where every finding is fixed or contested. rota reviews a plan with one critic and reviews code, not designs, with two reviewers.
- Brainstorming against an idea.
egm-brainstormruns several critical lenses at once before anything is drafted./rota-brainstormexplores approaches with you in one thread. - Documentation upkeep.
egm-bootstrapwrites READMEs for an existing codebase bottom-up, andegm-drift-reportcompares design docs with the code. rota’s drift checks cover its own contract docs, not your design docs. - No setup beyond a plugin. No binary, tracker or terminal host.
Where rota is stronger
- Everything after the design. Issues, implementation with recorded proof, review of the diff, and a test-gated merge. See how it works.
- Parallelism across issues. A rota round runs several issues at once in separate worktrees.
- Trackers. Items live in GitHub, GitLab, Jira or Linear (issue backend).
- Project knowledge beyond designs.
/rota-learnand/rota-decidekeep lessons and hard boundaries. See learning and decisions. - Releases. rota ships versioned releases; EGM is tracked by commit only.
Using both
They fit end to end, though running the two together is untested. Draft and review a design with EGM, commit it to docs/designs/, then capture its implementation section as rota issues and build them in a round. Both use fresh subagents and both write files rather than long chat replies, so the habits carry over. Name the design doc in each issue so workers read it.
Sources
- EGM README: description, skills, install, license, star count (18.6k on 2026-11-13).
- Getting started and harnesses: workflow, verified and experimental harnesses.
egm-reviewandegm-draft: review stages, synthesizer, refusal without subagents, design requirements.- Commits on
main:964a4f1, 2026-11-13; no tagged releases. - rota: README, how it works, plan critic.
More comparisons: how rota compares.