dsh-egm: A Design-First Review Workflow for DeepSeek Harness

What Does It Do?

EGM is a DSH plugin for DeepSeek Harness that brings the Elephant-Goldfish Model into the harness as a native design-review workflow: a context-rich Elephant session interviews you and drafts a design document, then fresh, zero-context, read-only Goldfish reviewers attack it for ambiguity, hidden assumptions, and implementation gaps, and you make the trade-offs and approve the specification before any code is written. It solves the problem of writing code before design decisions are settled, and fits changes that need design decisions first; for a small, clear bug fix, use your normal coding workflow. It is an independent community port of Google's Elephant-Goldfish Model, maintained by dryw under the Apache-2.0 license and last updated on 2026-11-01.

Core Features

• Two-role split: the Elephant holds your project, requirements, and earlier decisions and explores the problem, debates trade-offs, and drafts the spec; the Goldfish sees only the document and its referenced source material, without the earlier conversation, and hunts for missing assumptions, unclear requirements, and implementation risks.
• Read-only reviewers: reviews start through the plugin's egm_reviewer tool, which runs them in the bundled read-only egm-reviewer agent preset, so they can read and search files but have no write, edit, command, user-question, session-read, or delegation tools.
• Section-by-section drafting: the agreed direction becomes a design document under docs/designs/, pausing after each section for your feedback in chat.
• Goldfish Protocol review: zoom-out, naive-reader comprehension, design critique, intermediate zoom-out, and implementation readiness, followed by a synthesis pass that yields findings you can address one by one.
• Verbatim upstream port: the upstream skills, personas, and standards ship verbatim from a pinned commit, while DeepSeek Harness mechanics live in a small integration layer the host plugin prepends when it registers each skill.

How to Use This Plugin?

After enabling it in DSH, pick a feature that needs design decisions, such as webhook delivery and what should happen when a delivery fails or the same event arrives twice. First, type /egm-brainstorm with a one-line request and discuss requirements and trade-offs with the Elephant; fresh reviewers challenge the proposal and the agreed direction is saved as concepts_brief.md. Second, run /egm-draft to turn the brief into a section-by-section design document, pausing after each section for your feedback. Third, run /egm-review against the design document path to execute the full Goldfish Protocol, then use /egm-resolve to choose which findings to address. Finally, send the design for human review and tell the agent to build to the approved plan. Always use egm_reviewer rather than a plain subagent for reviewers: a plain subagent inherits the parent's tool belt, is not read-only, and must never run a Goldfish review, and a review in the same context is not a Goldfish review either. The plugin requires DeepSeek Harness 0.2.x at 0.2.1-rc.5 or newer, plus a composition with the skill registry, tools registry, subagent service, agent-presets service, and an in-process spawn subagent provider.

How to Troubleshoot This Plugin?

If reviewers can write files or run commands, you are probably using a plain subagent instead of egm_reviewer, which inherits the parent's tool belt and is not read-only; Goldfish reviews must go through egm_reviewer. If review findings miss the assumptions raised in earlier discussion, the review was likely run in the same context; only a fresh, zero-context session counts as a Goldfish review. If the plugin does not take effect or its skills and tools are missing, confirm the Harness version is in the 0.2.x line and at least 0.2.1-rc.5, and check that the composition includes the skill registry, tools registry, subagent service, agent-presets service, and an in-process spawn subagent provider, then repair it as the official instructions describe.