Turn most website into a command line interface, so AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity can browse without burning tokens on raw HTML or screenshots.
A typical page is tens of thousands of tokens of markup. The signal on it fits in a few hundred. only-cli fetches the page, distills it into a compact text view with numbered actions, and lets an agent drive the site by number:
```
$ oc open news.ycombinator.com
# Hacker News
[1] Show HN: I built a tiny CSV toolkit
[2] 312 comments
...
actions: do <n> | raw <url>
$ oc do 1
```
No per-site adapters required, no browser extension, no daemon. One generic distillation engine, three runtime dependencies, and a hard token budget on everything it prints.
Requires Node 20+. Requests go through [impers](https://github.com/lexiforest/impers) impersonating Chrome; if impers is unavailable the tool falls back to native fetch.
## For AI agents
The fastest setup is one line in your agent's instructions file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or equivalent):
> When you need content from a web page, run `npx @only-cli/oc open <url>` instead of fetching raw HTML. Run `npx @only-cli/oc --help` once to learn the commands.
Claude Code users can install the skill instead: copy `skills/only-cli/` into your project's `.claude/skills/` directory (or `~/.claude/skills/` to enable it everywhere). A skill costs almost no tokens until the agent actually invokes it, which fits how this whole project thinks. The same skill also installs through the [skills.sh](https://skills.sh) directory into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, and others:
No setup at all also works: `npx @only-cli/oc` runs without a global install, and the tool teaches its own command surface through `--help`, the `actions:` line at the bottom of every render, and error messages that name the next command to run.
oc open <url> fetch and render a page with numbered actions
oc raw <url> distilled markdown of the whole page
oc do <n> activate a numbered element (v0.2)
oc fill <n> <text> type into a numbered input (v0.2)
oc submit [n] submit a form (v0.2)
```
Flags: `--budget <tokens>` (default 500), `--json`, `--html` (raw as cleaned HTML instead of markdown), `--verbose`/`-v` (metrics on stderr: tokens saved vs the page HTML, HTTP status and client identity, timing, transfer size, memory; alias `--stats`, or export `OC_VERBOSE=1`). Metrics are off by default because they cost tokens too; agents should pass `--verbose` only when running verbosely.
only-cli works on any mostly-static website with no per-site setup: news sites, blogs, documentation, forums, search engines. One generic engine distills whatever HTML comes back. On top of that, `clis/` ships tuned command shortcuts for:
Not supported yet: pages that only render with JavaScript (a headless fallback is planned for v0.3), sites behind logins (sessions land in v0.2), and sites with hard bot challenges. Adding a site shortcut is a small JSON file; see [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).
## Benchmarks
Measured against live sites in [only-cli/benchmarks](https://github.com/only-cli/benchmarks) (only-cli 0.1.0, 2026-08-18):
| method | success | total tokens | avg ms |
| --- | ---: | ---: | ---: |
| `oc open` | 4/4 | 1,444 | 591 |
| `oc raw` | 4/4 | 15,170 | 659 |
| raw HTML fetch | 4/4 | 65,372 | 247 |
Across four real tasks (an article, a news front page, a Reddit discussion, a search) the compact view hands the agent 45x fewer tokens than raw HTML for roughly 350ms more per page. The heaviest single page, a Reddit thread, went from 52,899 tokens to 477. The benchmark repo has per-task numbers, methodology, and instructions for adding other tools and models.
Early. v0.1 covers static pages, budget-aware rendering, and offline tests. Sessions and actions land in v0.2, a lazy headless fallback for script-heavy pages in v0.3. The design principles and how to contribute are in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md).
