Summary

Heartbeats and cron jobs currently receive the full agent context (AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, USER.md, TOOLS.md, IDENTITY.md, etc.). For simple automated tasks, this is unnecessary overhead that:

• Burns tokens on context that won't be used
• Makes local/small models unusable (they truncate and hallucinate)
• Slows down simple checks

Proposed solution

Add a lightContext: true option for heartbeat and cron configurations that only injects:

• The task prompt itself (heartbeat prompt or cron event text)
• HEARTBEAT.md (for heartbeats)
• Minimal identity (agent name, basic capabilities)
• Tool definitions

Skip: SOUL.md, USER.md, IDENTITY.md, full AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md

Example config

{
  agents: {
    defaults: {
      heartbeat: {
        every: "30m",
        lightContext: true  // <-- new option
      }
    }
  }
}

Use case

Running heartbeats on a local 0.5B model (Ollama qwen2.5:0.5b). The full context is ~11k tokens, model truncates to 4k, produces garbage. With light context, small models become viable for simple periodic checks.