Friction Over Fiction: Why AI Agents Need to Feel Resistance
Tools are not free. That sentence sounds too obvious to deserve an article, which is usually a warning that the industry has built several architectures pretending it is false. A tool-using AI agent can call a search API, query a database, inspect a document, ask another model, trigger a diagnostic pipeline, or run a workflow step. In a clean demo, each call feels like another harmless unit of intelligence. The agent thinks, acts, observes, thinks again, and the audience applauds because the trace looks busy. Busy is often mistaken for capable. Enterprise software has enjoyed this little confusion for decades. ...