Coding Agents Spend 60.5% of Their Documentation Time on Instruction Files and Notes, Not Your Docs

arXiv 2608.20195·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

arXiv 2608.20195 traces agent-documentation behavior across 557 SWE-chat sessions (94,813 events, 3,033 documentation interactions) and 33,097 agentic pull requests from AIDev (690,260 classified file-level changes). Agent-facing artifacts, meaning instruction files and working notes, account for 60.5% of documentation interactions versus 10.6% for classical technical docs and 1.3% for API references; consultation is self-initiated 70.2% of the time and failure-driven only 7.5%. Reading docs is associated with less immediate testing (adjusted OR 0.39 [0.25, 0.60]), no explicit doc-based validation sequence was observed at all, and in multi-commit PRs code is touched before docs 4.7x more often, which undercuts the assumption that actionability and verifiability are what make docs agent-friendly.