The Integration Problem Nobody Anticipated When developers began building the first generation of LLM-powered applications in 2023, the obvious approach was to reach for the tools already in the toolbox. REST APIs had connected software systems for two decades. They were well-understood, well-documented, and supported by mature tooling. The assumption was that connecting an AI agent to a database, a calendar, or a CRM would work just like connecting any other piece of software to those systems. That assumption turned out to be wrong in ways that were not immediately obvious. Industry reports and Microsoft AI Red Team Research from 2025 show that agentic systems failed due to brittle tool…