Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Rausch, Andreas, Wittek, Stefan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866915865828524032
author Rausch, Andreas
Wittek, Stefan
author_facet Rausch, Andreas
Wittek, Stefan
contents Different domains foster different architectural styles -- and thus different documentation practices (e.g., state-based models for behavioral control vs. ER-style models for information structures). Agentic AI systems exhibit another characteristic style: specialized agents collaborate by exchanging artifacts, invoking external tools, and coordinating via recurring interaction patterns and quality gates. As these systems evolve into long-lived industrial solutions, documentation must capture these style-defining concerns rather than relying on ad-hoc code sketches or pipeline drawings. This paper reports industrial experience from joint projects and derives a documentation systematics tailored to this style. Concretely, we provide (i) a style-oriented modeling vocabulary and a small set of views for agents, artifacts, tools, and their coordination patterns, (ii) a hierarchical description technique aligned with C4 to structure these views across abstraction levels, and (iii) industrial examples with lessons learned that demonstrate how the approach yields transparent, maintainable architecture documentation supporting sustained evolution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects
Rausch, Andreas
Wittek, Stefan
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Different domains foster different architectural styles -- and thus different documentation practices (e.g., state-based models for behavioral control vs. ER-style models for information structures). Agentic AI systems exhibit another characteristic style: specialized agents collaborate by exchanging artifacts, invoking external tools, and coordinating via recurring interaction patterns and quality gates. As these systems evolve into long-lived industrial solutions, documentation must capture these style-defining concerns rather than relying on ad-hoc code sketches or pipeline drawings. This paper reports industrial experience from joint projects and derives a documentation systematics tailored to this style. Concretely, we provide (i) a style-oriented modeling vocabulary and a small set of views for agents, artifacts, tools, and their coordination patterns, (ii) a hierarchical description technique aligned with C4 to structure these views across abstraction levels, and (iii) industrial examples with lessons learned that demonstrate how the approach yields transparent, maintainable architecture documentation supporting sustained evolution.
title Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15021