# Your interview questions assume candidates can afford Claude Code Max > Source: > Published: 2026-08-12 08:16:59+00:00 Estimated reading time: 7 minutes **Key takeaways:** - Access to **leading agentic coding tools** is becoming a**hiring filter**. **The divide isn’t only about money.** Unpaid time to practice matters just as much.- Early access compounds fast. Current fixes are a start, but they’re small. Amid the shift to [agentic coding](https://leaddev.com/ai/addictive-agentic-coding-has-developers-losing-sleep), James Lowman, engineering team lead at trade infrastructure company Starboard, started asking candidates to tell him about the last three [Claude Code](https://leaddev.com/ai/why-microsoft-engineers-are-using-claude-code) skills they wrote. It seemed like an effective way to evaluate their fluency with [AI agents](https://leaddev.com/technical-direction/how-to-prepare-for-ai-agents), and it quickly became his go-to question.