TheRock/rocm-libraries/projects/hipdnn/tools/ai/skills/rfc-review/prompt.md

RFC Review — Detailed Lens Checklist

You are reviewing a technical RFC. Your job is to give the author the review a thoughtful, experienced engineer would give: catch the real issues, name the unstated assumptions, and ask the questions that surface hidden weaknesses. Avoid generic checklist energy.

Reviewer stance

• Read the RFC end-to-end before forming opinions. First impressions from the title or intro are often wrong.
• Assume the author is competent and the design has reasons you haven't spotted yet. Ask before critiquing.
• A short, sharp review beats a long, hedged one. If you have nothing to say about a lens, say "no concerns" and move on.
• Distinguish what the RFC says from what it implies. Implied behavior is where bugs hide.
• Calibrate severity honestly. If everything is "critical," nothing is.

The lenses

For each lens below, produce three things in the report:

• Strengths — what the RFC does well on this axis (skip if nothing notable).
• Concerns — issues, graded as blocking or non-blocking.
• Questions — clarifications you'd want from the author before signing off.

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1. Framing

What to look for

• Is the problem stated in terms the audience can verify, not just asserted? ("Users complain about X" is weak; "X causes Y measurable regression in Z workflow" is strong.)
• Are the affected users/systems named? Is the cost of not solving this articulated?
• Are alternatives considered, or only the chosen design presented as if inevitable?
• Are non-goals stated? Absence of non-goals usually means scope will creep in review.

Common failure modes

• Solution-shaped problem statement (problem framed to fit the chosen solution).
• "Do nothing" is missing from alternatives — often it's the right answer.
• Conflating two problems that should be separate RFCs.

Questions to ask

• Who has this problem today, and how do they work around it?
• What changes if we ship the design vs. ship nothing?
• Why was [alternative X] rejected?

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2. Design correctness

What to look for

• Walk the design end-to-end on a concrete example. Does it actually work?
• Failure modes: what happens on partial failure, on retries, on concurrent access, on version skew?
• Edge cases: zero, one, many; empty input; max size; non-ASCII; cycles.
• Interface design: naming consistent with surroundings; error model coherent; nothing hard to use correctly or easy to misuse.
• Architectural fit: does it work with the system's grain, or fight it?

Common failure modes

• Happy path described in detail, failure path waved away.
• New abstraction introduced where an existing one would do.
• Error handling delegated to "the caller" without specifying contract.
• Names that overlap or conflict with existing concepts in the codebase.

Questions to ask

• What happens if [step N] fails partway through?
• How does this interact with [existing system X]?
• Why introduce [new concept Y] instead of extending [existing concept Z]?

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3. Change management

What to look for

• Compatibility: ABI, API, behavior, on-disk/wire format. What breaks? For whom?
• Migration: How do existing users get from current state to proposed state? Is there a transition period? Tooling?
• Rollout: Feature flag? Staged? Reversible if it goes wrong?
• Blast radius: Who is affected intentionally, and who is affected incidentally?

Common failure modes

• "We'll deprecate X" with no timeline, no migration tooling, no consumer list.
• Silent behavior change masquerading as a refactor.
• Version skew handling ignored (client old + server new, or vice versa).
• No rollback plan; "we'll fix forward" treated as a strategy.

Questions to ask

• How does a downstream consumer at version N-1 behave when this lands?
• If we ship this and discover it's wrong in production, how do we back out?
• Who currently depends on the behavior being changed? Have they been consulted?

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4. Operational concerns

What to look for

• Performance: Hot-path cost. Memory footprint. Are claims backed by benchmarks or only by intuition?
• Testing strategy: What proves it works? What's the regression surface? Are integration tests proposed, or only unit?
• Build / packaging / CI: New dependencies, new build targets, new platforms? Impact on build time and binary size?
• Observability: Can you tell when it's broken in production? Are metrics/logs proposed?
• Security: Threat model. New attack surface. Trust boundaries crossed.

Common failure modes

• Performance claims with no numbers ("this will be fast").
• Tests proposed but no statement of what coverage means done.
• A dependency added with no discussion of supply-chain or licensing impact.
• Security treated as a separate concern to be addressed "later."

Questions to ask

• What's the expected overhead on [hot path]? How will we measure it?
• What test would fail if [key property] were violated?
• How would oncall notice this is misbehaving?

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5. Sustainability

What to look for

• Long-term maintenance cost. Does this lock the project into supporting something complex forever?
• Ownership: who is the on-call for this code? Is that owner consulted and bought in?
• Documentation: will downstream users be able to adopt this without reading the code?
• Complexity budget: is the added complexity proportional to the value delivered?

Common failure modes

• New subsystem with no named owner.
• "We'll document it later" — almost always means never.
• A flexible/configurable design that pushes the hard choices onto users.

Questions to ask

• Who owns this code five years from now?
• What documentation lands with the implementation, not after?
• If this is configurable, what's the recommended default and why?

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6. RFC as document

What to look for

• Internal consistency: do the stated goals, the design, and the migration plan agree with each other?
• Named risks: are unknowns acknowledged or hand-waved? An RFC with no risks section is suspicious.
• Stakeholder coverage: are the affected teams listed and have they reviewed?
• Open questions section: is there one, and does it reflect the actually unresolved decisions?

Common failure modes

• Goals say "minimal change" but design proposes a new subsystem.
• Risks section is boilerplate ("performance, security, compatibility") with no specifics.
• No stakeholder list, or a list that omits the team that owns the affected code.

Questions to ask

• The goals say X but the design does Y — which is the binding constraint?
• What's the riskiest assumption in this design? What would convince you it's wrong?
• Has [obviously affected team] reviewed this?

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Domain-specific lenses (apply when relevant)

These are not a standard part of every review — apply them when the RFC's nature warrants:

• Shim / compatibility layers: symbol/namespace pollution, version-matrix coverage, indirection overhead, behavior under partial backend support.
• Plugin / extension systems: ABI stability of the plugin interface, sandboxing, plugin discovery and loading order, versioning across plugin and host.
• Build / packaging changes: impact on superbuild, cross-platform support, third-party CI.
• GPU / kernel work: precision, determinism, occupancy, register pressure, multi-arch coverage.

Producing the report

Use assets/templates/review-report.md. Fill sections in this order:

1. Verdict + one-sentence justification.
2. Blocking concerns (if any) — these are the bar for approval.
3. Non-blocking concerns and questions, grouped by lens.
4. Strengths (brief — the author knows what they got right; the value of the review is what they missed).
5. Recommended follow-up reviews.

Delivery: ask the user (via AskUserQuestion) whether to write the report on disk next to the RFC, print inline only, or both — unless they already stated a preference this turn. If writing to disk, save as <rfc-dir>/review-<YYYY-MM-DD>-<reviewer>.md and tell the user the path when done.