Automatically producing useful documentation for a software repository is still an open problem. According to a new arXiv preprint, current systems approach the task as free-form text generation, with no explicit quality targets and little regard for the structure of the code itself.
The paper argues for two corrective principles. First, documentation should be standards-guided: generated text should follow defined quality specifications rather than being left open-ended. Second, it should be dependency-aware: generated documentation should account for how modules and functions rely on one another, instead of treating each piece in isolation.
The abstract stops short of describing implementation details or reported results, so the claims are limited to the stated motivation and design direction. Still, the framing suggests a move away from open-ended language modelling toward more constrained, code-aware generation.