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by v_CodeSentinal 140 days ago
I've been working on this problem specifically in the context of autonomous coding agents, and you hit the nail on the head with 'implicit context'.

The biggest issue isn't just that documentation gets outdated; it's that the 'mental model' of the system only exists accurately in a few engineers' heads at any given moment. When they leave or rotate, that model degrades.

We found the only way to really fight this is to make the system self-documenting in a semantic way—not just auto-generated docs, but maintaining a live graph of dependencies and logic that can be queried. If the 'map' of the territory isn't generated from the territory automatically, it will always drift. Manual updates are a losing battle.