Agents have turned up just about everywhere in software this past year, with one conspicuous exception: data. That’s a little odd, because querying data is exactly the kind of structured, checkable task that agents excel at. It’s worth separating two flavors of the idea: agents that do analytics, and agents that help you run the data plumbing. The boring work is where agents thriveUnglamorous maintenance is something agents are genuinely good at. Every data model is a stack of assumptions: this is unique, that’s always populated, these two tables join cleanly.