Inkling is a collaborative Markdown based RFC and note editor built to replace a Google Docs-based RFC process at Earendil. In many ways the RFC system at Earendil is inspired by Oxide Computer and other companies that use it internally.
The idea behind Inkling however is that it's not limited to formal RFCs. It does use numbered RFCs for proposals that are true RFCs but it also supports unnumbered notes for meeting notes, design sketches, investigations, and other discussions that do not warrant an RFC.
It is also agent-native: people and coding agents can work with the same documents, comments, metadata, and publication workflows through the web app, MCP, CLI, and API.
It's built to easily deploy to Cloudflare but can also be run locally.
- Draft Markdown together in real time with others.
- Leave comments inline and discuss documents.
- Create numbered RFCs as well as lightweight, unnumbered notes.
- Keep a live working draft while publishing explicit, immutable revisions.
- Share documents publicly and privately.
- Let agents create, read, search, edit, comment on, organize, and publish documents with the same authorization rules as people.
RFCs and notes use markdown as syntax. RFC numbers are allocated monotonically
and have canonical routes such as /rfc/0042. Notes are more informal and
always have their own internal document IDs as URL. They are for meeting notes
and other throwaway documents that do not need to live forever.
A note can be created as personal. Only its creator can find, open, or edit a personal document; nobody else in the workspace, administrators included, sees it in the catalog, in search, through references, or in Trash.
Its owner can share it with named people by email and through share links.
People it is shared with find it under “Shared with me” (is:shared) and can
read, comment on, and edit it, but cannot share it further, trash it, or move
it. Signed-in people who open a share link appear as themselves rather than as
guests. Personal documents cannot be published or numbered as RFCs. When it is
ready, its owner moves it to the workspace, which makes it an ordinary
workspace document. Until a workspace note is first published, its creator or
an administrator can make it personal again; everyone who edited or commented
on it keeps access. Workspace backups still contain personal documents.
The first top-level Markdown heading is the document title. Publication metadata lives in YAML frontmatter at the beginning of the collaborative source:
---
authors:
- author@example.com
state: discussion
visibility: private
labels:
- architecture
- platform
---Frontmatter does not itself change authorization or publish a working draft. An authorized user must explicitly publish it, which validates the frontmatter and creates an immutable published revision.
The public landing page lists public, published RFCs and notes without requiring sign-in. Anonymous readers see only those published revisions.
External destinations that should only be revealed to signed-in workspace members
can carry Inkling's reserved __require_auth=1 query parameter:
[Recording](https://videos.example/recording?id=123&__require_auth=1)Inkling removes the reserved parameter from the destination and sends anonymous
readers through Google sign-in before redirecting. The parameter must occur exactly
once with the value 1; ordinary parameters such as require_auth=1 are passed
through unchanged.
Link to another RFC or note, or to one of its sections, with a reference instead of a URL. Inkling fills in the target's current title and, for RFCs, the section number:
<rfc:57> → RFC 0057: Storage
<rfc:57#motivation> → RFC 0057 §3.2 Motivation
[](doc:doc_abc123#open-questions) → Meeting notes › Open questions
[the motivation](rfc:57#motivation)
[](#scope) → §2 Scope, within the same documentLinks with their own text keep it and show the target on hover. RFC headings are
numbered automatically, and section IDs are slugs of the heading text. Pin an ID
with ## Heading {#id} so renaming the heading keeps links to it working.
Hovering a heading shows a # link that copies the section's URL, and pasting a
link to a document or section of this workspace into the editor inserts a
reference.
References resolve for each reader. A reader sees the target's published revision when they may read it, otherwise its working draft. A reader who cannot open the target sees a placeholder such as “RFC 0057 (unavailable)”, and anonymous readers never receive the section ID. Signing in through the placeholder leads to the section.
Press / or Cmd/Ctrl+K from the workspace to focus
search. Plain terms search titles, complete working-draft bodies, RFC numbers,
labels, states, and people. Terms are combined with AND. Quote a phrase to
keep it together and prefix a term or filter with - to exclude it.
Search supports Gmail-style filters:
| Filter | Example |
|---|---|
| Label | label:platform or tag:"machine learning" |
| Lifecycle state | state:discussion |
| Visibility | visibility:public, visibility:private, or visibility:confidential |
| People | author:name@example.com, reviewer:alex, approver:sam, or person:lee |
| RFC number | rfc:42 |
| Document kind | is:rfc, is:note, is:published, or is:unpublished |
| Personal | is:personal (yours) or is:shared (shared with you) |
| Presence | has:rfc or has:publication |
Every Inkling instance is an MCP server at /mcp (Streamable HTTP). Agents
search, read, create, edit, comment on, publish, and trash documents through it
with the same authorization rules as people, and their edits appear live for
anyone editing in the browser. Agents only need the URL; signing in opens
Inkling in the browser, where the user approves access:
pi mcp add inkling --url https://rfcs.example.com/mcp
pi mcp login inklingAgent access in the account menu shows the equivalent commands for Pi, Claude Code, and Codex with the instance's own URL. Approved agents are listed under API keys, where they can be revoked. The MCP server's instructions cover document addressing and safe editing, so agents need no further setup.
The inkling command-line client remains for administration that does not fit
a tool call, such as imports, backups, restores, and attachment uploads:
inkling workspace add https://rfcs.example.com API_KEY
inkling import-rfc rfcs.example.com rfc-0057.md
inkling backup rfcs.example.com backup.jsonRun the CLI directly from a checkout with node packages/cli/src/main.ts --help.
Set INKLING_CONFIG to override the CLI configuration path and INKLING_AUTHOR
to set the guest comment name.
Inkling can run as a self-contained Node.js service backed by the filesystem or
on Cloudflare using Durable Objects and R2. See DEPLOYMENT.md
for local setup, Google OAuth configuration, Docker, and production deployment
instructions. Maintainers can find the npm package process in
RELEASING.md.