Codified Context: Infrastructure for AI Agents in a Complex Codebase
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-based agentic coding assistants lack persistent memory: they lose coherence across sessions, forget project conventions, and repeat known mistakes. Recent studies characterize how developers configure agents through manifest files, but an open challenge remains how to scale such configurations for large, multi-agent projects. This paper presents a three-component codified context infrastructure developed during construction of a 108,000-line C# distributed system: (1) a hot-memory constitution encoding conventions, retrieval hooks, and orchestration protocols; (2) 19 specialized domain-expert agents; and (3) a cold-memory knowledge base of 34 on-demand specification documents. Quantitative metrics on infrastructure growth and interaction patterns across 283 development sessions are reported alongside four observational case studies illustrating how codified context propagates across sessions to prevent failures and maintain consistency. The framework is published as an open-source companion repository.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 17 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2026.
Builds on
17 of 25 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
Same direction, newest first
- 2026On the Impact of AGENTS.md Files on the Efficiency of AI Coding Agents28 Jan
- 2026Agentic Much? Adoption of Coding Agents on GitHub26 Jan
- 2025Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases11 Dec
- 2025Agent READMEs: An Empirical Study of Context Files for Agentic Coding17 Nov
- 2025Decoding the Configuration of AI Coding Agents: Insights from Claude Code Projects12 Nov
- 2025Understanding and Bridging the Planner-Coder Gap: A Systematic Study on the Robustness of Multi-Agent Systems for Code Generation12 Oct
- 2025On the Use of Agentic Coding Manifests: An Empirical Study of Claude Code18 Sep
- 2025Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap7 Sep
- 2025Context Engineering for Multi-Agent LLM Code Assistants Using Elicit, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, and Claude Code9 Aug
- 2025A Survey on Code Generation with LLM-based Agents31 Jul
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation16 Aug
- 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development16 Jul
Other references · 5
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2025Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation: A Survey with Focus on Repository-Level Approachescited by 20
- 2025Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025cited by 17
- 2025Beyond the Prompt: An Empirical Study of Cursor Rulescited by 7
- 2025Promptware Engineering: Software Engineering for Prompt-Enabled Systemscited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026The Last Human-Written Paper: Agent-Native Research Artifactscited by 12
- 2026Knowledge Activation: AI Skills as the Institutional Knowledge Primitive for Agentic Software Developmentcited by 3
- 2026PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agentscited by 3
- 2026Formal Architecture Descriptors as Navigation Primitives for AI Coding Agentscited by 0
- 2026Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agentscited by 0
- 2026Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents18 Jun 2026
- 2026PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agents10 Jun 2026
- 2026The Last Human-Written Paper: Agent-Native Research Artifacts27 Apr 2026
- 2026Formal Architecture Descriptors as Navigation Primitives for AI Coding Agents11 Apr 2026
- 2026Knowledge Activation: AI Skills as the Institutional Knowledge Primitive for Agentic Software Development16 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Mise en Place for Agentic Coding: Deliberate Preparation as Context Engineering Methodology
- 2026A Phased Workflow for Operating LLM-Based Coding Agents
- 2026Do Context Files Help Coding Agents? A Two-Agent Ablation Study on Real Repositories
- 2026Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architectures
- 2026Memory as Infrastructure: Reliability Engineering for Persistent Agent Memory in Months-Long LLM-Assisted Development
- 2026Harness Engineering for Agentic AI Coding Tools: An Exploratory Study
- 2026When Agents Implement Systems: A Case Study in Defects, Detection, and Evaluation Rigor
- 2025AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities