Controlled evaluation of documentation-agent guidance and scaffolding

Determine whether explicit reader-goal instructions, task-completion and findability skills, broader tools, scratch notes, and explicit verification improve the quality of documentation produced by agents, using controlled comparisons against a baseline.

Background

The paper identifies several possible interventions for the observed agent failures, including prompting agents to consider the reader’s goal, training or skills focused on task completion and findability, expanded tooling, scratch notes, and explicit verification. These interventions are motivated by frequent task-completion gaps, poor findability, incomplete investigation, and premature closure during documentation generation.

The interventions were explored informally rather than through a systematic experiment. Consequently, the paper does not establish whether any of them improve documentation quality, leaving their causal effectiveness unresolved and motivating controlled baseline comparisons.

References

We explored these approaches informally but did not systematically compare them against a baseline, so we cannot conclude whether they improved documentation quality. Future work should test their effects through controlled comparisons.

— DoGBench: Can Agents Meet Expert Standards for User-Facing Documentation?  (2609.39909 - Liu et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section 7.4, “Additional guidance and scaffolding”