Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study

ArXi:2605.20049v1 Announce Type: cross As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we