I Stopped Calling Web APIs from My AI Agents. Here's What's 4x Faster.

FFor the first few months of building agent pipelines, every time an agent needed external data it did what any developer would do: called a REST API. A stock price, a shipping rate, a research paper citation. Doesn't matter what it was. The answer was always "call the API." That meant managing API keys per service, handling 429s with exponential backoff, parsing inconsistent JSON schemas, and watching agents stall for 40 to 50 seconds on a single data call. One of my agents was spending 60% o...