ACCEED: Persistent Structured Context for Code Agents

Code agents need to identify relevant modules and their interactions before modifying a repository. In large repositories, this can take extensive code exploration, which agents may repeat across tasks unless the knowledge is preserved. Documentation that preserves this knowledge for agents should state which module owns which code and how modules interact, let agents read only the detail a task needs, and stay current as code changes. Whether it meets these requirements depends on how it is organized: a tree gives each file one owner, but module interactions, such as shared dependencies, calls, and data flow, form a graph. We propose Artifact-Centric Code Exploration, Evolution & Drill-down for Hierarchical Knowledge Generation (ACCEED), built on a data structure that separates ownership from interaction, the Agent-oriented Documentation Intermediate Representation (AD-IR). Each AD-IR module owns a source scope, the files it is responsible for, nested in its parent's and disjoint from its siblings', and interactions are kept as typed relations and flows over the resulting tree. ACCEED uses these properties to build the tree recursively with one bounded scope per agent, give agents progressive access through doc-drill, and route code changes through source scopes to the nodes that own them. We also introduce ACCEED-Bench, 240 source-verified questions over six repositories, answered from documentation alone and scored by the weighted share of reference scoring points each answer covers. ACCEED's leaf pages alone outperform documentation from DeepWiki and Google Code Wiki on three shared repositories. AD-IR with doc-drill further improves coverage for every answering model, especially on cross-module and repository-wide questions. After 150 merged pull requests per repository, localized maintenance raises coverage on changed-code questions from \staleCov% with frozen documentation to \incrCov%, while changing about 1% of documentation lines.