Ontology-Grounded Project Memory for Coding Agents

Abstract:Coding agents have become the primary means of generating new code in many software projects, and the resulting velocity of changes makes keeping track of the reasons behind those changes challenging. This paper introduces MOOSEDev, a system designed to give coding agents structured, ontology-grounded project memory. The system captures architectural decisions, lessons, constraints, and rationales in a knowledge graph exposed to agents via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) interface. Records carry lifecycle status, provenance, and supersession links, queryable via MOOSE, a proprietary neurosymbolic engine that treats the symbolic layer as the primary reasoning substrate. We compared MOOSEDev against a production vector-memory tool on a neutral public corpus of 835 typed records. MOOSEDev returned the expected answer set essentially in full (0.98-1.00) on supersession, set-completeness, and negation questions, whereas the baseline's top-k retrieval surfaced between 6% and 27%. Conversely, relevance recall and token cost were largely equivalent between the two systems. We also describe a temporal commit-history bootstrap of our own codebase, a pre-registered live trial, and lessons learned.

5 pages. Accepted at NeSy 2026 (Industry Track); to appear in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research vol. 284. Benchmark artifact: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

arXiv:2608.13662 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.13662v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.13662 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.