My latest story in LeadDev, published today, begins with an anecdote about an engineering manager who recently got a harsh reality check.

While interviewing a candidate for an internship, he asked the candidate — still a college student — to tell him about the last three Claude Code skills they wrote. The question had become his go-to and, overall, is representative of how companies are evaluating developers these days. He never expected to hear “none,” but that was the answer: they couldn’t afford anything beyond the free tools, the student explained.

This problem doesn’t start or end with students, however. Even experienced engineers feel they need to spend big on leading edge agentic coding tools and devote their nights and weekends to side projects just to stay competitive, but not everyone can afford it or has the time to spare. So what does it mean if keeping up and getting hired depends heavily on access to expensive AI and the luxury of free time?

I spoke to a bunch of engineering professionals for this one, but I think the most interesting perspective came from Matthew Sharp, a researcher who studies digital divides as they relate to labor and recently published a paper on what he and his co-authors dubbed “agentic inequality.” While there have always been inequities that give some people an advantage, he makes a compelling argument that the introduction of agents differs from previous digital divides, particularly because agents function less as a tool and more as a personal workforce. “I think it’s a new inequality, and it’s gated by money, compute, expertise, and time,” he told me.

This issue is already starting to show up loud and clear in the software industry, which has adopted AI agents at a rapid pace. The next question is, where else will it show up and to what effect? It’s not yet clear if agents will be as useful in other types of work or in the personal lives of people who don’t live and breathe software, but these are the types of societal implications we need to be thinking about before redesigning the world around this technology.

The forward deployed engineer (FDE) craze has been thoroughly noted, with plenty of trend pieces explaining the origins of the role and citing data on its recent meteoric rise (there’s been a 729% increase in FDE job listings over the past year, according to Indeed). Now that FDEs have officially moved in with their customers, I wanted to go past the trend headlines and answer a deeper question: how’s it actually going?

For The Infinite Loop, I talked to FDEs and executives leaning into this strategy to better understand what it looks like in practice, the benefits, and the challenges. Overwhelmingly, they all cite breakneck speed to deployment as the biggest advantage, with one CIO who started a big push into FDEs a year ago telling me “what was taking months is taking weeks.” Ironically, the other big benefit is that in a world of increased automation, customers want an even heavier human touch.

I’ve been taking some time to think about the bigger picture of AI, explore new types of projects, and touch a lot of grass, so this issue of Sage Loves Tech is a short one. Hope you’re all having a great summer!