Beyond Human-Readable": code conventions are shifting toward the agent as primary reader

This new paper makes a concrete engineering argument: once LLM agents are the main consumers reading, writing, and debugging your code, optimizing purely for human readability can be counterproductive. It proposes semantic density optimization (strip zero-information tokens, keep high-signal ones), a program skeleton abstraction for fast agent navigation, and — provocatively — the selective "rehabilitation" of classical anti-patterns, validated on a log-format token-economy experiment. Useful framing when you design how agents log, summarize, and traverse a codebase.

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Sources: arXiv 2604.07502