# Integration Dead-Ends

#concept

## Summary

A distinct agent failure mode, separate from hallucination: the agent **accepts a task and starts working against a capability the user doesn't actually have** — a connector that isn't implemented, or one gated behind an account tier, paid seat, or corporate plan. The user only finds out after the time and tokens are already spent. [[larysa]]: "That's not hallucination exactly… it just first goes looking for what you don't have."

## Current Understanding

The failure is one of **optimistic capability assumption**. The agent reasons about the ideal tool for the job rather than the tools available to *this* user in *this* account, and nothing in the loop checks entitlement before work begins. Cost is asymmetric: the discovery happens late (half an hour in, in Larysa's case), so the whole run is wasted rather than cheaply rejected.

Three concrete gates seen in the corpus:

- **No external API at all** — Microsoft Teams. Asserted as an outright dead end for a chat-watching auto-task bot.
- **Paid seat required** — Slack has first-class Claude support from Anthropic, but the seat wasn't granted; Figma's editable access needs a personal paid account.
- **Account type** — the recommended path existed only for corporate, not private, accounts.

The corpus offers **no fix**, only a discipline: **verify the integration and account requirements up front** (connector exists? private vs. corporate? paid seat?) before letting the agent spend. Both participants explicitly left the general problem unsolved. Structurally this is the mirror image of [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]] — there the agent over-interprets an under-specified *goal*; here it over-assumes an unverified *capability*.

Note the enterprise angle: entitlement gates are precisely what a centrally-managed harness could encode once for everyone, rather than each user rediscovering them by burning tokens ([[enterprise-ai-reality]]).

## Evidence

- The Teams/ClickUp bot dead end, private-vs-corporate account gate, the "half an hour" cost, "I don't know how to fight this" — [[2026-07-21-larysa-interview]].
- Slack/Figma paid-seat blockers from the same interview.

## Related Pages

- Concepts: [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]], [[skills-as-memory]] (a skill can freeze "what we actually have access to"), [[context-as-scarce-resource]], [[enterprise-ai-reality]], [[evolution-of-agent-tooling]]
- Entities: [[larysa]], [[eugene]], [[claude-code]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- "Teams has no usable external API" is an assertion by the participants, not a demonstrated finding. Status: tentative.
- Whether this is a harness bug (no entitlement pre-check) or a user-workflow gap is unresolved in the corpus.

## Next Questions

- Could a standing "available integrations" context doc or skill — an explicit capability inventory — pre-empt this cheaply?
- Do agents fail this way on *local* capabilities too (missing binaries, no credentials), or is it specific to hosted connectors?