RFC

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

An RFC, in modern engineering-culture speak, is a short document you write before you build something big, laying out the problem and your proposed solution so the whole team can poke holes in it while it's still just words on a page, not three weeks of finished code. It's cheaper to argue about a paragraph than to argue about a finished pull request nobody wants to unwind.

Real Talk

In engineering culture, an RFC is a structured proposal document circulated for team feedback before significant implementation work begins, covering the problem statement, proposed approach, alternatives considered, and open questions. The format traces its name to the IETF's original Request for Comments process for internet standards, but internal engineering RFCs are typically lighter weight, living in a repo or wiki with a comment or approval period rather than going through formal standards ratification.

Show Me The Code

# RFC: Replace REST gateway with GraphQL federation

## Problem
## Proposed solution
## Alternatives considered
## Open questions

When You'll Hear This

"Write an RFC before you touch the auth system, that's too big to just wing in a PR." / "The RFC surfaced three edge cases nobody thought of before we wrote a line of code."