Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents?

SonarSource researchers ran 660 trials with Claude Code across 33 tasks in minimal-pair repos. Code cleanliness didn't change pass rates, but cleaner code cut token usage by 7–8% and file revisits by 34%. Clean code doesn't decide success, but it materially lowers compute cost and navigation overhead for coding agents.

Why it matters: Solid experimental design with minimal pairs to isolate the variable. The finding is counterintuitive: cleanliness doesn't affect pass rate but saves tokens and reduces redundant operations. Directly useful for engineers using coding agents daily. Points off for small sample (...