What is openhands-autodocs?

OpenHands Autodocs is a plugin and workflow for the OpenHands AI coding agent platform that writes and keeps up to date documentation for a code repository. The idea is to give both human developers and future AI coding agents a reliable starting point for understanding a project, and to keep that documentation fresh as the codebase changes over time. When it runs inside an OpenHands conversation, Autodocs reads the repository's structure, its existing docs, tests, configuration files, some git history, and current changes. From that, it creates or updates a set of documentation files following a format called OpenWiki, starting with a quickstart page, and it also adds or refreshes a top level reference file such as AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md pointing to the generated docs. It keeps a log of what it updated and tracks its changes so it knows what has already been documented. Autodocs deliberately keeps its changes limited to documentation and agent guidance files, so it does not touch the actual application source code. The generated documentation aims to answer practical questions a new engineer or coding agent would ask, such as what the project does, where the important workflows live, how to verify a common change, what to read before editing something, and which parts of the codebase are risky to change. Autodocs offers three modes: a standard mode that works from source files and git history alone, an enriched mode that adds structured code intelligence from an optional separate tool called GitNexus when it is available, and a planning mode that only proposes a documentation plan without writing anything yet. This is aimed at development teams already using OpenHands to automate coding tasks who want durable, self-updating repository documentation rather than docs that quickly go stale. It runs through OpenHands surfaces like Agent Canvas or OpenHands Cloud, and setup involves loading the Autodocs plugin and pointing OpenHands at a target repository.