AI writes your architecture docs—from your code

Kari Jaaskelainen

— 1 min read
AI writes your architecture docs—from your code

AI that writes your architecture docs—from your code

Architecture docs often lag behind reality. This research shows a semi-automated way to generate Software Architecture Descriptions (SADs) directly from source code.

  • Recover the system’s structure with reverse engineering to build a high-level component diagram.
  • Use a large language model to highlight architecturally significant “core” components via prompt engineering.
  • Generate state-machine diagrams that capture how components behave, guided by few-shot examples and domain hints.

Why it matters: less manual effort, faster onboarding, lower cognitive load, and documentation that stays aligned with the codebase.

Demonstrated on C++, but the approach is broadly applicable. It pairs human oversight with LLMs to abstract complexity and accurately reflect behavior.

By Ahmad Hatahet, Christoph Knieke, and Andreas Rausch. Read the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05165v1

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05165v1

Register: https://www.AiFeta.com

#SoftwareArchitecture #LLM #ReverseEngineering #Documentation #DeveloperExperience #Cplusplus #AI #SoftwareEngineering

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