Remember Your Trace: Memory-Guided Long-Horizon Agentic Framework for Consistent and Hierarchical Repository-Level Code Documentation
For software developers and coding agents, MemDocAgent addresses the problem of inconsistent and non-hierarchical documentation in large codebases.
MemDocAgent generates consistent, hierarchical repository-level code documentation by processing the entire repository in a single context, using dependency-aware traversal and shared memory. It outperforms open- and closed-source baselines in multi-criteria evaluation.
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.