rfd

name	rfd
description	Read Oxide RFD contents, metadata, and images by number using rfd-cli. Use when an RFD comes up (e.g. "RFD 63", "what does the networking RFD say") and you need the actual text.

RFD

Oxide RFDs live in the oxidecomputer/rfd repo, but each RFD's content sits on its own branch, so the local clone (~/oxide/rfd) can't be grepped as a flat tree. The canonical source is the RFD API, which rfd-cli talks to. Prefer rfd-cli over poking at the repo.

rfd-cli is installed at ~/.local/bin/rfd-cli (invoke as rfd-cli, not rfd). All commands take -f json implicitly when piped; output is JSON.

Get an RFD's contents

rfd-cli view --number 63 | jq -r '.content'

.content is the canonical raw AsciiDoc (the only content field — view returns it once; meta is the same record minus .content). It begins with the :key: value attribute block and the = RFD N Title heading.

Useful metadata fields on the same record: .title, .state, .authors, .discussion (PR URL), .link (GitHub tree URL at the rendered commit), and .commit (the commit SHA the content was rendered from — needed for images).

rfd-cli view --number 63 | jq '{title, state, authors, discussion, link, commit}'

Search

Search hits the RFD index (Meilisearch) and returns section-level results — reasonable for finding which RFD/section discusses a topic, then view it.

rfd-cli search --q "boundary services" --limit 10 \
  | jq -r '.hits[] | "RFD \(.rfd_number) [#\(.anchor)] \(.hierarchy | map(select(.)) | join(" > "))"' \
  | sort -u

Each hit also has .content (the matching passage) and .formatted.content (same, with <em> around matched terms). It's keyword search, not semantic — try a few phrasings.

List

rfd-cli list | jq -r '.[] | "\(.rfd_number)\t\(.state)\t\(.title)"' | sort -n

Images

RFD AsciiDoc references images with image::filename[] (or image:filename[] inline). The files aren't in the API response; they live next to the RFD in the repo at rfd/NNNN/filename (zero-padded to 4 digits). Fetch them from the local clone at the exact commit the API rendered (.commit), then Read the file:

# find image refs
rfd-cli view --number 63 | jq -r '.content' | rg 'image::?'

# extract one at the rendered commit
sha=$(rfd-cli view --number 63 | jq -r '.commit')
git -C ~/oxide/rfd show "$sha:rfd/0063/l3.png" > /tmp/rfd63-l3.png

Then Read /tmp/rfd63-l3.png to view it.

If git show fails with "bad object", the commit isn't fetched locally yet — git -C ~/oxide/rfd fetch origin and retry. Access to private RFD images is just the user's normal repo access; there's no separate image auth to deal with when going through the local clone.