Why AI Coding Agents Need a Deterministic Code Health Gate

CodeHealth is an aggregated metric based on 25+ factors scanned from the source code. The code health factors correlate with increased maintenance costs and an increased risk for defects, and predicts whether AI agents will introduce defects or not. Code above 9.0 is human-readable, code above 9.5 is AI-ready. CodeHealth is an aggregated metric based on 25+ factors scanned from the source code. The code health factors correlate with increased maintenance costs and an increased risk for defects, and predicts whether AI agents will introduce defects or not. Code above 9.0 is human-readable, code above 9.5 is AI-ready. Why do coding agents need deterministic guidance over probabilistic AI reviews? An agent session rarely touches a file once. It plans, writes, then keeps iterating across the same files and commits, and every extra pass is another chance for the code to drift out of shape while still reading as locally sound. A model checking its own output does not fix this: sounding certain and being correct are two different things. That is why independent checks such as linters, coverage, and security scanners are necessary, but none of them answer the question that predicts whether the next agent's edit will hold: is…