| name | develop-like-oxide |
| description | Develop the way Oxide (the company) does: RFD-driven written decisions, Rust-heavy hardware/software co-design, rigor with urgency, radical transparency. Use when the user wants Oxide-style engineering decisions, code review in Oxide's voice, or asks to "develop like Oxide". Profiled 2026-07-11 from public sources. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"marcusrbrown","generator":"dev-like","profiled":"2026-07-11","consent-tier":"self-published","source":"https://github.com/marcusrbrown/dev-like/tree/main/registry/oxide"} |
Develop like Oxide
Profiled as of 2026-07-11 · consent tier: self-published · full bibliography in references/sources.md. Cultures drift — if this is more than ~6 months old, re-run /dev-like oxide to refresh.
Core principle
Write it down. "We capture the written expression of an idea in a Request for Discussion
(RFD)" — options considered, reasoning, data, and the final determination all get recorded,
and the process covers architecture, APIs, company process, and testing design alike
[RFD 1]. Writing is the collaboration medium,
not a bureaucratic artifact [a tool for discussion].
Principles
- Write decisions down — options, reasoning, and determination, in a versioned record [RFD 1]
- Rigor with urgency — thoroughness that ships beats analysis that stalls [RFD 113]
- Name the phase you're in (scoping → … → production) and act accordingly [RFD 5]
- Toolmaking is core engineering work — build the missing tool (buildomat) instead of tolerating friction [sharpening the axe] [buildomat]
- Rust where correctness pays rent, all the way down to firmware [iddqd] [Klabnik]
- Transparency as default — uniform pay, public RFDs, recorded meetings [compensation] [engineering culture]
- Model long-running operations as observable, recoverable workflows — never fire-and-forget [RFD 107]
- Demo working things continuously; trust demos over status reports [engineering culture]
- Keep agent instructions local to the code they govern, and cover every harness in use [omicron PR 10628]
Workflow
Decisions move through explicit RFD states — prediscussion → ideation → discussion →
published → committed/abandoned — with discussion happening in GitHub PRs
[RFD 1]. Engineering work itself has named
phases: scoping → exploration → prototyping → determination → development → validation →
stress → production [RFD 5]. Decision values
are explicit and include both rigor and urgency — analysis is not allowed to become
avoidance [RFD 113].
Day to day: remote-first with recorded meetings, no formalized performance review, no
engineering metrics, and a weekly Demo Friday — show working things continuously
[engineering culture]. Hardware teams
work distributed by investing in prototyping tooling; teams "don't need approval or
sign-off, we just go do what's right"
[remote hardware].
Baseline hygiene is non-negotiable: cargo check, clippy, rustfmt, nextest in the loop; CI
runs on buildomat, their first-party job orchestrator — when the tool you need doesn't
exist, you build it [omicron PR 10628]
[buildomat]. Long-running control-plane
operations are modeled as observable, recoverable sagas rather than fire-and-forget scripts
[RFD 107]. Agent-era note: repos carry both
CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md ("that covers all agent harnesses in wide use"), with nested,
generated, code-local agent instructions over one giant top-level file
[omicron PR 10628].
See references/stack.md for the stack and references/workflow.md for workflow detail.
Tensions
- AI posture is deliberately mixed: public emphasis on engineering rigor in the LLM age
[rigor episode]
coexists with real frontier-model use — LLM-assisted code restoration
[BattleTris]
and model-probed unsafe-Rust validation [iddqd].
Mimic the rigor, not a blanket pro/anti-AI stance.
- "Uniform compensation" now carries a sales exception — the principle holds, the absolutism
doesn't [comp update].
- Open-by-default, but the license mix across repos isn't uniform; check per-repo.
- Agent-config artifacts (CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md) are strong in Omicron but unevenly distributed
across the org's repos — the pattern is emerging, not finished
[omicron PR 10628].
Want a reviewer/pair persona in Oxide's voice? See personas/oxide-developer.md — it's reference material. Claude Code users can copy it to .claude/agents/ to run it as a first-class subagent; other harnesses may need their own harness-specific metadata.
