arXiv AI By Zhijun Gao, Jing Chen

From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation

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arXiv:2608. 20195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Technical documentation is written for human developers, but an increasing share of software changes is now authored by autonomous coding agents.

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From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation

The study investigates how autonomous coding agents interact with technical documentation, analyzing 557 coding sessions and 33,097 pull requests. Findings reveal that agents primarily engage with agent-facing artefacts, show weak links between documentation consultation and code editing, lack explicit validation sequences, and tend to consult documentation after code changes. The authors propose a two‑lobed cycle model of agent‑documentation interaction and challenge assumptions about actionability and verifiability of agent‑friendly documentation.