The elephant and the goldfish
Grillhouse implements the Elephant–Goldfish Model: an agent that holds the context writes, agents that hold none review, and a human settles the trade-offs.
Dave Rensin describes the model. Google open-sourced its own plugin for it, EGM, in October 2026. Grillhouse was built on the same principle independently, with its first public commit on 2026-10-07, and applies it to every ticket, from its design to its merge.
note
Grillhouse is not affiliated with Google, and is not endorsed by Google. EGM is cited here as another implementation of the same model.
The correspondence
| Elephant–Goldfish | Grillhouse |
|---|---|
| The elephant holds the context and drafts | The supervisor, and the explorer, which writes the plan of a ticket |
| Goldfish: fresh, read-only reviewers | The questioner (the plan), the reviewer (the lot), each a fresh sub-agent |
| The human approves the design before code | The grill; the owner validates architecture, frame and interfaces |
| Design before implementation | A decision is taken and written in the ticket before any code |
| Not for a small, clear fix | A gesture without new behaviour leaves the circuit of code |
| A drift report between documents and code | Guards hold interfaces and languages against the code at every pass |
Past the design
Grillhouse carries the model past the design:
- A fresh agent, the testwriter, writes the tests from the specification before any code.
- The developer works under write locks, and only on the packages of the plan.
- The reviewer returns one conformity line per element that the lot adds, changes or removes.
Not in Grillhouse yet
Two practices of EGM are not in Grillhouse yet, and both are planned:
- a design review by several fresh lenses, before the owner validates the design;
- a drift report on the architecture's prose.