A lot of code smells matter more for humans than LLMs (and LLMs have their own unique code smells). For example, nested ternary operators are a great source of bugs in human code, but agents could care less, but humans handle multiple files with the same variable names and lots of duplicated code well, whereas this stuff confuses agents.

>but agents could care less,

The phrase is "couldn't care less". If you "could care less" then you actually care about it. If you "couldn't care less" then there's no caring at all.