Databases Were Not Designed for This

Agentic AI systems violate 40 years of database design assumptions built around deterministic, human-authored queries. The article identifies specific failures: unpredictable agent queries break query planners and indexes, multi-step reasoning holds connections longer than expected, agents write autonomously without review, and connection pools overflow from unexpected concurrency. Defensive patterns include role-level statement timeouts, soft deletes, append-only event logs, and mandatory idempotency keys.