Why I Built xAgent

I started building xAgent in April 2025. The original idea was straightforward: build a task-oriented Agent that could run work on its own and turn AI into real automation. Looking back, that sentence sounds simple. Most of what I have done over the past year has been filling in everything hidden inside the words “run work on its own.” The first version used a single Agent. I quickly ran into a problem: once the prompt focused its attention on one kind of work, the Agent could do that work well but handle other tasks terribly. Fix one side and it would forget the other. Ask it to pay attention to everything and it would end up paying proper attention to nothing. That led me to multiple Agents, each responsible for a different part of the work and able to collaborate with the others. The idea worked, but as soon as they started running together, the next problem became obvious: tokens were too expensive. I bought a modified RTX 4090 with 48 GB of VRAM and started running open models locally. That took some pressure off the token bill, but exposed another problem: small open models were not smart enough. This was still the Qwen 3.0 era. The gap between local models and the best hosted models was obvious, especially on long tasks. They skipped steps, wandered away from the goal, and ignored instructions in all sorts of ways. I did not solve this by buying more tokens from top-tier models. It was not because those models were bad. The most practical reason was that I simply did not have the money. Once multiple Agents run continuously, the allowance included with a subscription disappears quickly. Spending more could solve the problem, but I could not afford to keep doing that, and it did not look sustainable for most individuals or small teams either. Not having the money forced me to think seriously about a question that has shaped xAgent ever since: can a small team with a limited budget use Agents properly without constantly paying for the best models, keeping costs