Compact Documentation for Coding Agents: A Benchmark, an Optimizer, and Why It Does Not Transfer
We investigate whether natural-language documentation helps coding agents resolve software issues, and we build the tools to construct and evaluate it. We introduce a roundtrip benchmark that scores code descriptions by whether code regenerated from them passes the original tests, and show that completeness, not length, drives a description's fidelity. Using the benchmark as an optimization signal, we discover a description-writing prompt that reaches full fidelity and generalizes to unseen files. We then test the hypothesis that motivated the work: that better documentation helps an agent resolve real repository issues. Across two model families and ten repositories, and against a positi...
| Authors | Md Shohel Arman, Igor Molybog |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 25 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 September 2026 |
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