From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation
Coding agents mostly use agent-facing notes, not traditional docs.
The paper studies 557 SWE-chat sessions and 33,097 AIDev pull requests to trace how agents interact with documentation. Instruction files and working notes made up 60.5% of documentation interactions, while classical technical documentation was 10.6% and API references 1.3%. The authors found no explicit documentation-based validation sequence, and consultation was linked with less immediate testing. Documentation also tended to follow code changes rather than precede them. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
The paper studies 557 SWE-chat sessions and 33,097 AIDev pull requests to trace how agents interact with documentation. Instruction files and working notes made up 60.5% of documentation interactions, while classical technical documentation was 10.6% and API references 1.3%. The authors found no explicit documentation-based validation sequence, and consultation was linked with less immediate testing. Documentation also tended to follow code changes rather than precede them. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
score 5