Documentation is the part of software development everyone agrees matters and almost no one actually does. Factory is betting that the right fix is to make it automatic. Their new AutoWiki product generates structured, browsable documentation from a codebase and refreshes it on every push to your default branch, treating docs as a build artifact rather than a backlog item.
To show what it can do on real code, Factory has published a gallery of 100 open-source wikis spanning everything from React and Kubernetes to the Linux kernel and llama.cpp. The collection covers 14 programming languages, 4,700 generated pages, and over 6.7 million GitHub stars worth of indexed code.
What the pipeline actually does
AutoWiki is not a single prompt sent to a language model. It is a multi-phase, multi-agent process designed to handle the fact that important context in large codebases is spread across entry points, APIs, services, configuration, and history. The pipeline runs in six stages:
- Survey -- a two-pass analysis: a structural scan of READMEs, package manifests, CI config, and entry points, followed by a deeper semantic scan of routes, API endpoints, service classes, database schemas, and feature flags.
- Plan -- the system decides the wiki structure based on what it found.
- Generate -- specialized agents, each scoped to one facet of the repo, produce pages in dependency order.
- Visual capture -- screenshots and diagrams are captured from the codebase.
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