RFC Authoring and Maintenance

This skill authors and maintains lightweight RFCs — numbered Markdown design proposals that live in the repository next to the code they describe. An RFC captures a design before (or while) it is built: the problem, the current state of the code, the locked decisions with their rationale, and what is deliberately out of scope. The collection is tracked by a single INDEX.md so the whole design history is scannable in one table.

RFCs here are working documents, not bureaucracy: they exist so that decisions survive context loss, so that a picked-up design is "a single small PR, nothing more", and so that rejected alternatives don't get re-litigated.

The mechanical half is a script

Location, numbering, filenames, statuses, index rows and the next free number are conventions a program applies. scripts/rfc_index.py applies them, and its check is the gate:

python3 scripts/rfc_index.py check          # index vs files, H1 vs filename, statuses, next-free,
                                            # decision table present and fully graded, Related links resolve
python3 scripts/rfc_index.py next           # next free number
python3 scripts/rfc_index.py new "Title"    # allocate + instantiate template + index row + bump

(From a repository root the script is at skills/rfc-writer/scripts/rfc_index.py. Read-only except new; add --root DIR — before or after the subcommand — if the repo isn't the cwd.) The procedure around it, the document's anatomy, and its prose style are in references/workflows.md and references/authoring.md.