Define the in-file RFC contract in docs/rfc/README.md § The file format:
the header block (`# RFC: <title>` plus a dateless Status enum
cross-checked against the lifecycle folder), the per-lifecycle body
skeleton (a Problem opener everywhere; Proposal/Alternatives considered/
Acceptance criteria/Risks in proposed/; present-tense Decision/
Consequences with proposal-era headings banned in implemented/; the
frozen proposal shape in rejected/), and a mandatory Alternatives
considered section with a date-fenced grandfather comment for pre-format
RFCs whose alternatives are not reconstructible from the record.
Enforce it with a new doc-sync gate, scripts/verify-rfc-format.ts, and
normalize all 112 RFCs to it: ~15 Status-line spellings collapse to the
enum, 29 Context openers become Problem, the 39 legacy-format XXX debt
markers are resolved and banned from reappearing, proposal-era sections
in implemented RFCs are rewritten to shipped reality (including the
web/fs/subagent seam RFCs' migration plans and test checklists, closing
the doc-tiers deferred-work item on the web seam), every RFC gains an
Alternatives considered section or the grandfather comment, and the
bilingual pair is re-mirrored and re-recorded.
Move the generated index tables out of README.md into a fully generated
docs/rfc/INDEX.md — gen-rfc-index now writes the whole file, and
verify-rfc-classification checks its freshness and rejects index-shaped
rows in the curated README — which makes room for the format contract to
live in the README front door instead of a separate FORMAT.md.
The decision record, and the first RFC written in the new format, is
docs/rfc/implemented/process/2026-07-05-uniform-rfc-format.md.
Codex review found three gaps between the documented contract and what
the gate enforced, each proven by a failing probe before this fix:
- a generated region must sit directly under its own '## {Lifecycle}'
heading (the last H2 above the begin marker), so a drifted heading
can no longer leave the tables filed under the wrong section;
- the lifecycle set is closed like the class set: an unknown directory
under docs/rfc/ is a structure error, not an invisible subtree;
- an index-shaped table row linking into a lifecycle folder OUTSIDE the
generated regions is an error (prose links to RFCs stay legal), so
'listed exactly once' cannot be violated by a hand-added row.
knip: the walker/renderer internals (the closed sets, the heading and
marker helpers, the per-lifecycle renderer) have no importer beyond
this module — the public surface is rfcRoot, walkRfcTree, and
spliceReadme, the three names the generator CLI and the gate consume.
docs/rfc/README.md's per-lifecycle tables are now generated between
gen-rfc-index marker comments from each RFC's path (lifecycle/class),
H1 title (optional 'RFC: ' prefix stripped), and filename date, sorted
by date then filename — the one docs region every proposal wave edits
and every concurrent branch conflicts on becomes derived state.
scripts/rfc-index.ts owns the shared walker (closed lifecycle/class
sets, structure rules, parseable-H1 requirement) and the renderer;
gen-rfc-index.ts is the writer CLI; verify-rfc-classification.ts keeps
the structure check and asserts the committed regions byte-match a
fresh render (freshness subsumes the index-completeness check, since a
generated-from-disk table is definitionally complete and correctly
headed). A malformed H1 is a hard error in both directions, so the H1
is now load-bearing as the title source — the one nonconforming H1
(a status suffix duplicating the path) is normalized.
Implements docs/rfc/implemented/process/2026-07-04-generate-rfc-index-tables.md
(moved from proposed/ and amended to the shipped mechanics); the
classification RFC's verify-only stance carries the supersession
cross-link per implemented/AGENTS.md.
Tianyi Cui