The stock quote task made a fine single-page example but understated the
real gap: on a task with a couple of hops, Claude Code's own WebFetch and
WebSearch are blocked from reddit.com outright and it has no default shell
fallback, so it fails the task rather than just costing more. Codex's
default gets there through its own web search plus curl, at 2.7x oc's
tokens. That comparison now leads the README, with the stock quote case
kept below it as the honest counterexample where a default tool wins.
Also corrects the earlier claim that Codex reads raw HTML with curl by
default: it reaches for its own web search tool first and, on the AAPL
page, never opens the page at all, which is why it reported a stale price.
Found while chasing an anomalous benchmark rerun: under a sandbox that
blocks writes outside its workspace (codex exec's default), 'oc open'
still renders fine but its session save throws, and the bare catch {}
swallowed it completely. The next 'oc do' then resolves against whatever
session last saved successfully, silently, with no sign the state is
stale. In one repro this served a Hacker News agent a Yahoo Finance page
under 'oc do 5' and it answered from that instead of erroring, which is
how a multi-step task ballooned to 250k tokens without a single wrong
tool call visible in the log.
This does not fix the staleness itself, that needs a design for detecting
a save failure across separate 'oc open' and 'oc do' invocations. It makes
the failure visible on stderr instead of invisible, which is the cheap
half of 'fail loud and cheap' and better than nothing while the real fix
gets designed. Verified manually against an unwritable OC_HOME; cli.js's
main() always calls the network fetcher, so an automated test here would
need fetch-mocking infrastructure this project has none of yet, and none
of cli.js has test coverage today.
Yahoo Finance quote, news, history, lookup, markets, gainers, losers, and
trending pages all arrive server rendered (the AAPL quote page carries the
closing price in about 456 tokens of view against 325,000 of raw HTML), so
a definition ships for all eight. The README grows the comparison people
actually ask for: the same stock price task run through Claude Code and
Codex as they ship versus with oc, one live session each, wrong answer and
all. Codex read raw HTML and reported a price that is not on the page;
WebFetch's digest was cheaper than oc this run and the README says so
plainly rather than hiding it. Also a banner, badges, and an llms.txt
pointer, so both people and models skimming the repo can tell what it is.
Three changes with one motive: a second command costs an agent more than
the lines it saves. 'oc do' on a heading or text block now prints the read
instead of refusing, since refusing spends a whole turn naming the command
that should have run. A page that would finish within about four times the
budget is printed whole rather than cut, because the cut moves tokens into
a second command instead of saving them. And social timelines stopped
rendering as one fused paragraph: linkedom splits text nodes around
apostrophes, so fragments are merged back by parent node and edge
whitespace, block elements now end lines, and repeated button labels are
trimmed sooner than links because a button label is never the content.
With that, x.com profiles and posts read without a login, so a six line
cli definition ships for the two x.com pages that work.
The budget was being spent on whatever came first in the document, which on
most pages is menus. On the Reddit thread the benchmark uses, all 500 tokens
went to nav, sidebar, and moderator boxes, so an agent that opened the page to
read the discussion had to escalate to oc raw to see a single comment.
distill now finds the content (main, role=main, a single article, else the
densest run of prose) and emits it first, with the rest of the page after it
under a divider. Nothing is dropped, so do <n> still reaches every link.
Link labels that repeat down a page go with it: a thread stamps permalink,
save, and report onto every comment, which cost more than the comments. The
count and three examples are printed in place, and oc raw still has them.
Same thread, before and after: 660 blocks to 254, whole compact page 4,184
tokens to 2,712, and the first view now holds comments instead of a sidebar.
Pages small enough to print whole keep document order.
find searches the distilled page the session already holds, prints one line
per match with the number to read it by, and costs no fetch. It matches the
query as a phrase, case insensitive, and falls back to matching the words
separately when the phrase is not there.
On the reddit thread from the benchmark: 'oc find w3m' is 115 tokens against
9,670 for oc raw, and it lands on the numbers to read.
The compact view was all or nothing: an agent that needed more than the 500
token budget had only oc raw, ten to twenty times the price. Now open saves
the distilled page, next continues it where the view stopped, and read <n>
prints one region in full. Headings and text blocks long enough to be cut are
numbered so they can be addressed, and the marker prices what it left behind.
On one Reddit thread: open 475 tokens, next 455, read 88, raw 9,670.
The compact view hides link URLs because printing them is most of what
makes a page expensive, which left an agent re-fetching the same page as
--json or raw just to learn where [15] pointed. oc open now saves the
handles it numbered to a small JSON file per session under ~/.only-cli
(OC_HOME relocates it), and oc do <n> resolves one and renders the target
exactly as open would. Search engine tracking redirects are unwrapped so a
result link opens the destination instead of a script page.
Errors name the command that fixes them, since agents read them: an
out-of-range number reports the valid range, an input says to use fill, a
button says the page handles it itself.
Two hops on Hacker News cost about 3k characters this way, against roughly
23k for the re-fetch route.
Each claude -p session now loads a skill documenting its tool, so every
condition runs at its best. The multiplier on the page-view table is the
precise one: all six pages for less than half the tokens of the cheapest
rival, a single-screenshot floor.
Page-view table now includes Playwright MCP snapshots, Browser Use state
messages, rendered HTML via Playwright and Selenium, and the computer-use
screenshot floors. New table for the end-to-end claude -p benchmark: the
agent finished all three tasks with oc on the fewest tokens and lowest
cost of any full-success condition, while raw curl, Jina Reader, and
Playwright MCP each burned 13 turns on the Reddit task and returned
nothing.
The feed fixture covers Atom entries (escaped bodies, self-closed
categories, bylines) and an RSS item with a CDATA body. Raw markdown of
a feed exposed an old quirk: cleanDocument removed the head before
toMarkdown read the title, so any page whose body lacked a matching h1
lost its title in raw mode. cleanDocument now captures the title first
and returns both.
Sites behind hard bot challenges often leave their feeds open. distill()
now detects feed XML, converts entries (title, byline, link, escaped HTML
body) into a plain HTML document, and everything downstream is unchanged.
fetch accepts xml content types. Ships a stackoverflow.com spec mapping
question/tag/user onto the feed URLs.
Live: oc open on a Stack Overflow question feed renders ~493 tokens vs
~29k for the page HTML, HTTP 200 where the HTML page is challenged.
setup-node's registry-url writes an npmrc auth-token line with a
placeholder token, which npm used instead of OIDC and got a 404 from
the registry. Dropping registry-url lets trusted publishing work.
New clis: github.com (repo, user, search, trending, issues) and
linkedin.com (profile, company, jobs; public guest views work through
the Chrome fingerprint). Both verified live before shipping.
With the package scoped, owner/repo and scope/name line up exactly:
github.com/only-cli/oc is npm @only-cli/oc is the oc command. The skill
installs with npx skills add only-cli/oc.
npm rejects the unscoped name only-cli as too similar to the existing
onlycli package, so the package lives in the org scope with the binary
name. The command is still oc and the repo is still only-cli/only-cli;
install snippets across README, SKILL.md, llms.txt, and the benchmark
docs now say npx @only-cli/oc.
The README now lists the tuned site shortcuts (Hacker News, Reddit,
DuckDuckGo, Bing) next to the generic engine, and cites the live
benchmark numbers from only-cli/benchmarks. llms.txt gives AI assistants
a one-page summary to index. npm keywords added for search.
The internal build spec moves out of the published repo.
npm ci in CI requires package-lock.json, so stop ignoring it; it pins CI
and contributor installs only, consumers never see it.
publish.yml now maps release channels to npm dist-tags: latest, beta,
alpha (from the version suffix of a GitHub release) and dev (manual runs
stamp a unique 0.x.y-dev.N version per build). Publishing a prerelease
version to latest fails loud.
Generic distillation engine (no per-site adapters): fetch via impers
impersonating Chrome with a firefox-fingerprint retry, distill to an
interaction tree, render under a hard token budget with numbered action
handles. Raw mode emits markdown via turndown or cleaned HTML. Per-site
CLI definitions for HN, Reddit, Bing, DuckDuckGo. Offline test suite,
agent skill, OIDC publish workflow.
only-cli