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Use case

AI Workflows for Engineering RFCs

RFC processes fail at the review step: authors wait days for substantive feedback, then get a mix of typo nits and one architectural objection that should have arrived before they wrote section four. Reviewers, for their part, face a twelve-page document with no map of what's load-bearing.

The result is RFCs that are approved through fatigue rather than scrutiny — and decision records that don't capture why the decision was actually made.

How it works with an agent fleet

A Fleet workflow gives every RFC a structured first review within minutes of submission — flagging unsupported claims, unconsidered alternatives, and missing failure analysis — then routes a flagged draft back to the author (bounded), and records the final human approval as the decision.

genflows:
  - name: rfc-review
    steps:
      - {name: critique, prompt: "Review the RFC in the trigger ticket against the corpus: flag claims contradicted by existing design docs, alternatives dismissed without analysis, and missing failure modes.", corpus: ["docs/rfcs/**/*.md", "docs/architecture/*.md"], kind: review, out: critique.md}
      - {name: approve, depends_on: [critique], kind: approval, out: decision.md}

In the builder, the review's flag outcome routes back to the author with a bounded retry count — a flagged RFC returns with specific objections, revised, and re-reviewed, at most N times before the gate escalates regardless. The human approver decides with the critique in hand, and the recorded decision becomes the RFC's audit trail.

The fleet pattern

Submission → structured critique against the existing design corpus → bounded revise-and-resubmit loop → human approval as the recorded decision. Reviewers spend their attention on judgment; the map of what's questionable is already drawn.

Guardrails that matter here

  • The critique cross-references existing architecture docs — 'this contradicts the retention design from RFC-031' is exactly the catch human reviewers miss under load
  • Revision loops are bounded (maxRounds + an escalation route), so an RFC can't ping-pong indefinitely
  • The approval record is the decision record: approver, timestamp, and the exact revision approved

Who this is for

Teams with an RFC or design-doc culture where review latency and review depth are in visible tension — and where past decisions live in docs the next RFC should be checked against.

Frequently asked questions

Does the AI critique replace human review?

It replaces the first read, not the decision. The critique flags what deserves human attention — contradictions, gaps, unanalyzed alternatives — and the approval gate is always a named human. Most teams find human review gets sharper, because it starts from the flags.

What corpus does the critique check against?

Your accepted RFCs and architecture docs. That's the quiet compounding benefit: every accepted RFC strengthens the reviewer that checks the next one.

Run your first agent fleet

One binary. Five minutes. See every agent, coordinate every handoff, and keep a full audit trail of what your fleet did.