> America is at-will employment and employers can basically make up whatever rules they want.
this is a bit misleading
at-will deployment and "can basically make up whatever rules" aren't necessary required to go hand in hand, you can have at-will deployment and still proper enforce labor laws by giving appropriate penalties and protection to employees in case of violations which make it non profitable use the "break law if complain fire" route.
But seriously it's more then just bad.
Adding hidden cost to "working" is a hidden pay cut not showing up in payment statistic, that alone should make it illegal.
And it is in combination with "cost traps" a common recipe of modern slavery. While this case isn't modern slavery just a economic collapse (e.g. huge economic collapse where no one can afford to lose the job they have, AI stays expensive but inflation makes salaries go away) to ending up very close to it...
Sure there are reasonable edge cases, like causal personal clothes if there is no dress code or similar. As well as some limited expected private payments for high paying jobs (which you often still can write off from taxes, but(!) for this you need to have to pay enough taxes or it won't work and you have to have enough tax write-off potential left for all the common write-offs etc. Hence why this is only true for high paying jobs or very very small mostly one-off expenses.).
> coding agents count as “hand tools”
they are tools you use (in general) "by hand", to mostly do the non engineering/non creative parts of the job. So even if they don't count as it now, they might very well end up counting as something similar. Just because something is digital doesn't mean you can (or at least should be able to) circumvent regulations. That he EU had to pass a "digital products are products, laws for products apply to them" because lobbyist managed to make digital products non products for many laws is already quite absurd. Similar digital "tools" should count as much as "tools" as physical tools...