You don't need documentation or the 3rd party memory systems. The code IS the documentation.
All this stuff is LLM rube goldberg machines. It just pollutes context.
I barely use AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md these days. And where they remain, it's super basic high level stuff.
I'm honestly still kicking myself in the ass on many projects where I did something similar to this. I kept tons of markdown docs and decision docs. Now those things are just causing problems because they got stale. Even after having sessions of reconciling documentation, the LLM just gets confused.
It's frequent for SWEs to make blanket statements with considering the vast space of issues other people face that they don't have experience with or awareness of. Anyway, I'm not going to tell you what you do or don't need, only what worked and didn't for me.
In my codebase it is difficult to get agreement on comments and documentation so rather than rely on it I adapted. One of the first things I did when I succumbed to agentic development was to point codex at the code and ask it to generate a high level description of where important files, such as our public API, reside, what the hierarchy is, what the code does, etc. In my case, this level of documentation is fairly static if I avoid implementation details. So now I have a handful of agent files in my tree and it seems to save quite a few tokens and improve my results. I frequently have other devs ask me how I get such good results when doing agentic reviews of their changes(always my first step now before I start my human review). I also include instructions in the agents files instructing the agent to maintain the agent files if any relevant changes are made. It seems to work quite well for me.
kaydub · · focus · HN ↗
All this stuff is LLM rube goldberg machines. It just pollutes context.
I barely use AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md these days. And where they remain, it's super basic high level stuff.
I'm honestly still kicking myself in the ass on many projects where I did something similar to this. I kept tons of markdown docs and decision docs. Now those things are just causing problems because they got stale. Even after having sessions of reconciling documentation, the LLM just gets confused.
01100011 · · focus · HN ↗
In my codebase it is difficult to get agreement on comments and documentation so rather than rely on it I adapted. One of the first things I did when I succumbed to agentic development was to point codex at the code and ask it to generate a high level description of where important files, such as our public API, reside, what the hierarchy is, what the code does, etc. In my case, this level of documentation is fairly static if I avoid implementation details. So now I have a handful of agent files in my tree and it seems to save quite a few tokens and improve my results. I frequently have other devs ask me how I get such good results when doing agentic reviews of their changes(always my first step now before I start my human review). I also include instructions in the agents files instructing the agent to maintain the agent files if any relevant changes are made. It seems to work quite well for me.
kaydub · · focus · HN ↗
If you got the LLM to generate the docs, they don't need the docs.