Where RCF Lite is up to

RCF Lite is one method in five pieces: define, build, verify, release, audit. They are not equally far along, and this page exists to say so honestly rather than let the docs imply a finished suite. Every capability claim here is checkable against the shipped packages: rcf-lite 0.15.0 and @stravica-ai/rcf-schemas 0.5.1, both on the public npm registry, and rcf help prints the live surface. The version numbers on this page are read from the installed packages at build time, so the page cannot say one thing while npm says another.

One structural point before the list: the chain orders the method, but the positions are not hard dependencies, so verify and audit are usable on their own terms without running the whole chain.

The percentages below are judgement anchored to concrete milestones, shipped on npm, shipping as a stopgap inside rcf-lite, scoped but unbuilt, or not started, rather than burn-down arithmetic.

Define: roughly 40%

Define is the piece that gets what you want built out of a conversation and into a valid document chain. It is not its own package yet. What ships today ships inside rcf-lite, in two halves:

• The authoring and validation surface, complete and shipped: rcf define create / read / update / delete / link / validate, schema-checked on every write, with document types as the contract.
• A lightweight elicitation capability, and this half is a polyfill: the elicitation playbook the agent walks (classify what already exists, validate it, elicit the gaps), the discover verbs behind it (intake, preflight, req-classify, req-baseline and friends), and the rcf_elicit_requirements MCP prompt. It serves until the define piece is properly implemented as its own package.

What you can do today: hand your agent a product idea and have it draw a valid, reviewable tree out of a conversation with you. That works now and is the primary path. What you cannot do: install a define tool on its own; the deeper elicitation tooling the piece deserves does not exist yet.

Build: roughly 80%

Build is the most complete piece and the reason the tooling exists. The whole loop ships in rcf-lite: the FBS queue, spec bundles with full ancestry, the five-stage build cycle, a forward-only lifecycle that refuses backward transitions, the Code Node gate tying acceptance criteria to source, and the finalise ship gate. What you cannot do yet is treat the surface as settled: the package is 0.x and the surface still moves between minors.

Verify: roughly 60%

Verify is the independent adversarial check: a fresh-context verifier driven against a running app, not a re-read of the code. It ships inside rcf-lite as the verify group: rcf verify run takes a runtime profile (deployed, CI or local-dev) and the app's URL, emits a structured report with a verdict, and provision / cleanup stand up and tear down what a run needs. It is wired into rcf build finalise as the gate that promotes work to verified. The core is real and running; the score is not higher because the piece is younger than build and its edges, provisioning across real third-party services in particular, are still being worked in.

Release: roughly 5%

Release is scoped but unbuilt. Its scope is deliberately narrow: deploy gates only, checks that stand between verified work and a deployment, not operating what you deploy, which is outside RCF by design. What exists today is a single shipped primitive inside rcf-lite, a placeholder-credential detector for the deploy-gate class of defect, where an app ships with a placeholder API key and a core flow is silently inert. There is no release tool to install or run yet.

Audit: roughly 15%

Two things share this name, and the split matters. The audit CLI group ships today and is the read side of the chain: the tree viewer, coverage, trace and impact. Use them now. The audit piece of the method is bigger and is not built: retention of verification evidence over time, and aggregate rollups of the form "X of Y acceptance criteria independently verified", the thing you would hand to an auditor or a due-diligence team. Until that exists, the honest statement is: you can inspect the chain's current state in full, and you cannot yet produce a retained, aggregated evidence trail from it.

Checking this page

Nothing above is aspirational, and staying that way is the point of the page. To check it yourself:

npm view rcf-lite version
npm view @stravica-ai/rcf-schemas version
rcf help

If a capability named here is missing from the shipped surface, that is a defect in this page. When a piece ships or moves, this page moves with it.