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

2026-05-14

AI Summary

Existing repository-level code documentation approaches often treat individual components in isolation, leading to redundant retrieval, conflicting descriptions, and a lack of hierarchical structure. This work proposes MemDocAgent, a framework that enables collaborative generation of structured documentation through dependency-aware traversal order and a shared memory mechanism, allowing agents to operate within a unified context. The framework introduces RepoMemory, which supports agents in reading, writing, and validating historical trajectories to ensure consistency and hierarchy over long-horizon documentation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that MemDocAgent significantly outperforms both open-source and closed-source baselines across multiple evaluation dimensions, highlighting its practical utility in real-world software development scenarios.

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.

Problem

• code documentation
• repository-level
• hierarchical structure
• consistency
• long-horizon

Innovation

• Memory-Guided Agentic Framework
• Repository-Level Code Documentation
• Dependency-Aware Traversal
• Shared Memory
• Long-Horizon Planning