The RFC Glut: What Happens to Design Review When Writing Is Free
A polished eight-page design doc used to mean something before anyone read a word of it. The existence of the artifact was evidence: someone spent two weeks thinking about failure modes, arguing with themselves about tradeoffs, and pre-empting the objections they knew reviewers would raise. The document was a receipt for the thinking. Reviewers could triage by polish alone, because polish was expensive to fake.
That correlation is now dead. An agent produces a comprehensive, well-structured, diagram-laden RFC in under an hour — complete with an alternatives-considered section for alternatives nobody actually considered. The artifact survived; the signal it carried did not. And most engineering organizations are still running a review process that was designed, implicitly, around the old cost of writing.
