Being Domesticated by Your Agent Framework Is Probably the Biggest Risk for Most Agent Users

Starting mid-February, I downloaded an instance of a wildly popular open-source agent framework and dove into 10+ hours of daily development. But I quickly realized something felt off — the framework always gave me this nagging sense that I couldn't fully use my strength. I wasn't content with simple chat interactions or basic task delegation through WhatsApp or messaging apps. I wanted to push into hard territory — using agents to find logical flaws in a philosophy book I'd written, building an intelligence-gathering framework for financial markets, running deep critiques on investment strategies. What I found was that even with a freshly reset session, before I'd done anything, the agent's context was already packed with nearly 20K tokens. Most of it was system info the framework forced the agent to read — stuff that had nothing to do with my actual task. The SOUL.md personality mechanism was fun at first, but its effects were all over the place. Eventually I decided it worked more l