> "the scaffolding produced by the team" also includes the scaffolding produced by past AIs.

This statement is also true of humans. Everything you've stated here is also true for human engineers.

    > "the scaffolding produced by the team" also includes the scaffolding produced by past engineers.

But the agent can be instructed reliably to keep documentation accurate and up to date and will then do so dutifully. Put it in AGENTS.md that it must always update the /docs directory by creating a new doc or updating an existing doc and it will do it. (Yes, adherence may be 95% of the time, but that is likely several points higher than with most non-NASA human teams)

Better yet, extract docs from code comments. Even better when the docs are spatially co-located and line of sight as the agent crawls through code.