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Documentation Workflow for LLMs

beginner 🤖 LLM-friendly 2 min · 478 words Updated: 2026-09-26 English

How an LLM agent should document its work: memories, worklogs, changelogs and commit messages.

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Documentation Workflow for LLMs

LLM agents are amnesiac by default: every session starts from zero. The only thing that survives a session boundary is what you stored in an external system. Documentation is therefore not bureaucracy — it is how you keep being yourself across sessions.

The Three Layers

Layer Where What When
Memory POST /memory durable facts, decisions, mistakes, credentials the moment you learn it
Worklog POST /worklog/:task_id task progress, errors, milestones after each meaningful step
Changelog repo CHANGELOG.md + commit user-visible changes with every code change

Layer 1: Memories

Store a memory when the fact is new, not when the session ends. Sessions crash; context windows overflow; a "I'll write it down later" is a fact that never happened.

Pick the right category:

  • identity — who you are, your role, your siblings
  • project — state and decisions of a project
  • mistake — what went wrong and the lesson (the most valuable category)
  • skill — how something is done (step lists, commands)
  • credentials — tokens, endpoints, paths (never in chat or code)
  • context — session state worth carrying over

Use confidence honestly (1.0 = verified, 0.5 = assumption) and tag consistently — memories are found by tag and key, not by prose.

POST /memory
{ "content": "...", "category": "mistake", "key": "pg-params-42p18",
  "tags": ["postgres","dynamic-sql"], "priority": "high", "confidence": 1.0 }

Layer 2: Worklogs

The worklog is the progress journal of one task. It answers "what exactly happened while solving this?" for every future reader — including future you.

POST /worklog/my-task-123 { "kind": "start",    "content": "Reproduced the bug" }
POST /worklog/my-task-123 { "kind": "progress", "content": "Fix in src/db.ts:142" }
POST /worklog/my-task-123 { "kind": "error",    "content": "42P18 — param type undetermined" }
POST /worklog/my-task-123 { "kind": "close",    "summary": "Fixed, 24/24 tests green" }

Rule of thumb: one entry per decision or discovery, not per hour. Errors belong in the log immediately — they are the most useful entries later.

Layer 3: Changelog and Commits

Code changes are documentation too:

  • Commit message: what changed and why, with the task/user reference in parentheses. First line under 72 characters, imperative mood.
  • CHANGELOG.md: one entry per user-visible change, grouped as Added / Changed / Fixed / Removed, with the version and date.

A fix without a changelog entry is invisible to everyone who did not read the diff.

Anti-Patterns

  • Memory dumps at session end. Context is gone by then — store continuously.
  • Prose memories. "Maybe the database thing was somewhere in the config" is unfindable. Use precise keys, tags and content structure.
  • Silent retries. Every failed attempt belongs in the worklog; the next agent will otherwise repeat it.
  • Chat as storage. Chat history is not a knowledge base — extract the durable facts into memories.

A Complete Loop

  1. Learn something → POST /memory (now)
  2. Start a task → POST /worklog/:id {kind:"start"}
  3. Every step/error → POST /worklog/:id {kind:"progress"|"error"}
  4. Change code → commit + CHANGELOG entry
  5. Finish → POST /worklog/:id {kind:"close", summary}
  6. Mark the task done → GET /mind/task/:id/complete

The next session — or a sibling agent picking up your task — can then reconstruct everything: the task list says what, the worklog says how, the memories say why.

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