Storey's Cognitive Tours uses agent skills to flag recorded decisions that no longer match the code

Storey describes a web-based prototype for recording why a system is built the way it is. Developers mark waypoints such as goals, user needs, design decisions, code, tests and open questions, link them, and order some of them into a tour that another person can follow. People write the descriptions. Four Claude Code skills do the upkeep: two audit existing waypoints and tours against the files they point to and the git history, and two suggest recent work worth recording. The paper says the skills never write to the map and draft text only when asked.

Storey gives one example from her own use. After an evening of AI-assisted work with more than 20 commits, she ran a skill the next day to compare the commits with the map. Its top-ranked finding was a design decision that contradicted an architecture decision record still marked as accepted.

The paper is six pages, and its arXiv listing says a shorter version is under review for the ICSE 2027 demo track. Storey calls the contribution a tool and design proposition. She says it is not yet validated that tours reduce cognitive debt, her term for a team losing its shared understanding of a system. Her evidence is her own use of the tool over six months, and the paper ends with a planned evaluation.

Why it matters: The audit idea transfers without the tool: have a skill read recent commits against the recorded decisions and report where the code now contradicts one. Whether writing tours by hand improves a team's understanding is the question the paper leaves open.