Your interview questions assume candidates can afford Claude Code Max

James Lowman, engineering team lead at trade infrastructure company Starboard, now asks candidates about the last three Claude Code skills they wrote, making access to leading agentic coding tools a hiring filter. The divide is not only about money; unpaid time to practice matters just as much, and early access compounds fast.

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.