RFC: {title}

• Author(s): {names}
• Status: Draft | In review | Approved | Rejected | Implemented
• Created: {YYYY-MM-DD}
• Updated: {YYYY-MM-DD}
• Tracking: {ticket or link}
• Related ADRs: {links, once decisions are accepted}

Summary

{One paragraph. A reader should understand the proposal from this section alone.}

Motivation

{The problem, the users who have it, and why it is worth solving now. Include the concrete cases this design has to handle.}

Goals and non-goals

Goals

• {what success looks like}

Non-goals

• {a plausible goal you are explicitly not taking on}

Non-goals are reasonable things you choose not to do, not negated qualities such as “the system should not crash”.

Proposed design

{Overview first, then the parts that carry the trade-offs: boundaries, main flows, APIs, data. Explain how it works. Link a diagram when a picture is clearer than a paragraph. Do not paste a full schema that will be stale next week.}

Alternatives considered

Alternative	Why it was not chosen
{option}	{trade-off against the goals}
Do nothing	{cost of not doing this}

Drawbacks and risks

• Security and privacy: {impact and mitigation}
• Performance and scale: {expected load and behavior}
• Operability: {failure modes, rollout, rollback}
• Compatibility: {migration or deprecation}

Rollout

{How this reaches production, how you know it worked, and how you undo it.}

Unresolved questions

• {what review or implementation still has to settle}

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For a small change, keep Summary, Motivation, Proposed design, and Unresolved questions. Delete the rest.