Your Agent Can't Help You — And It's Not Because It's Dumb

In the previous post we argued that the CLI vs. MCP debate is really a debate about pipes — and what's actually missing is the faucet. This post digs one level deeper: even if you open the faucet, you probably still can't connect to it. The reasons agents struggle in the real world are more structural than most people realize. A Common Promise "Let an agent automatically write your weekly status report — it reads your Git commits, Slack channel history, Jira ticket updates, and Google Calendar meetings, then generates a report your manager can actually read." This is the story agent products love to tell. It sounds reasonable — the data is all yours, you're already using all the tools, you're just automating what you'd otherwise do by hand. But if you actually try it, you'll find that only 1 out of 5 data sources works: It's not that the agent isn't smart enough. It's not that the CLI isn't efficient enough. The data simply isn't reachable. There are, of course, some "workaround" appro