Really glad to see folks looking into quantitative approaches to give agents feedback on code quality. This post looks like a good start!

My main feedback for the authors would be, the most important problems for sloppiness are global properties, not local ones. In my experience an agent, like a human, has finite capacity for its attention, but if it runs into local sloppiness that gets in its way, it can fix it on a by-need basis. The technical debt issues that matter are usually global issues that aren't so easy to fix: they require global analysis and global refactoring.

I don't know the answer, but I think we're going to need ways to measure architectural properties, like separation of concerns, clear architectural layering, well-defined interfaces, etc.