From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation
Technical documentation is written for human developers, but an increasing share of software changes is now authored by autonomous coding agents. Which documents they consult, when, and what follows remain unknown. We conduct a behaviour-grounded study of agent-documentation interaction across two public datasets: 557 agentic coding sessions from SWE-chat, yielding 94,813 development events including 3,033 documentation interactions; and 33,097 agentic pull requests from AIDev, with 690,260 classified file-level change records. Four findings challenge current documentation practice. First, age
Lineage graph
Paper → model → repo connections mined from source citations (Tier-1 exact match).
Why these links exist
Every edge carries a method, confidence, and the source snippet that justified it — so bad links are debuggable.
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 59%AgentCore-8B →
“Fuzzy title match (0.73): “From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Emp” ≈ “AgentCore-8B””
- PossiblePossibly related (embedding) · 69%Why your agent needs access to your documentation →
- PossiblePossibly related (embedding) · 59%Show HN: CodeAlmanac – Karpathy-style codebase wiki from your conversations →
- PossiblePossibly related (embedding) · 57%Open-source agent framework crosses 50k stars →
- PossiblePossibly related (embedding) · 55%AgentTrace →
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 87%NirDiamant/GenAI_Agents →
“Fuzzy title match (0.94): “From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Emp” ≈ “NirDiamant/GenAI_Agents””
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 87%SWE-agent/SWE-agent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.94): “From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Emp” ≈ “SWE-agent/SWE-agent””
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 87%zhayujie/CowAgent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.94): “From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Emp” ≈ “zhayujie/CowAgent””