Write LEP

Mechanical authoring of a new LEP. The rules — per-section and cross-cutting — live in docs/proposals/README.md. The template at docs/proposals/lep-template.md is just the section skeleton. This guide is the procedure for applying both.

Before you start

Read docs/proposals/README.md ("How to write an LEP"). It is the canonical source for what each section requires and for the cross-cutting rules (active voice, public citations, no fabrication).

Read docs/proposals/lep-template.md to confirm the section structure and frontmatter shape.

Find out what the user has by way of prior research: notes, related reviews, design conversations, related tickets, pasted content, file paths, glob patterns, public links. Any form is fine. If they have nothing, proceed without.

If the user did not pass a title as an argument, ask for a short descriptive one.

Naming the file

Filenames follow YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md, where <slug> is the kebab-case form of the title (lowercase, hyphens, no punctuation, max ~6 words). Today's date comes from date +%Y-%m-%d. If a file with the chosen name already exists in docs/proposals/, append -2, -3, etc. until you reach a free name.

Drafting

Before drafting, check the scope against the README's One decision per proposal. When the work has parts that can be accepted on their own, write a proposal for each. A part that changes an accepted LEP is an amendment to it, as the README's Lifecycle describes. Tell the user the split before you draft.

Start from the template's structure — same sections in the same order. For each section, apply the rules in docs/proposals/README.md and replace the template's placeholder text with your content.

When research and user input genuinely don't support a claim, mark {TODO: <what's missing>} in place rather than inventing detail.

Do not editorialize about the proposal's quality. Apply the rules; gaps become {TODO}s, not opinions.

Finishing

Set the frontmatter: lep is the filename without .md, status is Draft, created and updated are today's date. Write the file to docs/proposals/<filename>.

Tell the user to run /review-lep docs/proposals/<filename> before sharing the LEP. Staging, committing, and opening it for review are the author's calls — this guide stops at writing the file.