English

Remember Your Trace: Memory-Guided Long-Horizon Agentic Framework for Consistent and Hierarchical Repository-Level Code Documentation

Software Engineering 2026-05-15 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Automated code documentation is essential for modern software development, providing the contextual grounding that both human developers and coding agents rely on to navigate large codebases. Existing repository-level approaches process components independently, causing redundant retrieval and conflicting descriptions across documents while producing outputs that lack hierarchical structure. Therefore, we propose MemDocAgent, a long-horizon agentic framework that generates documentation within a single, integrated context spanning the entire repository. It combines two components: (i) Dependency-Aware Traversal Guiding that predetermines a traversal order respecting dependency and granularity hierarchies; (ii) Memory-Guided Agentic Interaction, in which the agent interacts with RepoMemory, a shared memory accumulating prior work traces through read, write, and verify operations. Through an in-depth multi-criteria evaluation, MemDocAgent achieves the best performance over both open and closed-source baselines and demonstrates practical applicability in real software development workflows.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14563,
  title  = {Remember Your Trace: Memory-Guided Long-Horizon Agentic Framework for Consistent and Hierarchical Repository-Level Code Documentation},
  author = {Suyoung Bae and Jaehoon Lee and Changkyu Choi and YunSeok Choi and Jee-Hyong Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14563},
  year   = {2026}
}