only-cli

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.

Install

npm install -g @only-cli/oc

Requires Node 20+. Requests go through 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 directory into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, and others:

npx skills add only-cli/oc

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.

Commands

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.

Supported websites

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:

website	domain	shortcuts
Hacker News	news.ycombinator.com	top, new, item <id>, user <name>
Reddit	reddit.com (via old.reddit.com)	sub <name>, post <id>, user <name>, search <query>
GitHub	github.com	repo <owner> <name>, user <name>, search <query>, trending, issues <owner> <name>
LinkedIn	linkedin.com	profile <name>, company <name>, jobs <query> (public guest views)
DuckDuckGo	duckduckgo.com	search <query>, lite <query>
Bing	bing.com	search <query>, news <query>
Stack Overflow	stackoverflow.com (via Atom feeds)	question <id>, tag <name>, user <id>, recent

The engine also renders Atom and RSS feeds as regular pages. That is how Stack Overflow works: the site serves every HTML page a Cloudflare challenge, but publishes full question and answer bodies under /feeds, so oc open stackoverflow.com/feeds/question/11227809 returns the question and its top answers in about 500 tokens. The same trick applies to any site that gates its pages but leaves its feeds open.

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 that do not expose feeds. Adding a site shortcut is a small JSON file; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Benchmarks

Measured against live sites in only-cli/benchmarks (only-cli 0.2.0-beta.1, 2026-08-18). What each method hands the agent per page view, across six real tasks (an article, a news front page, a Reddit discussion, a web search, a GitHub repository search, a LinkedIn company page):

method	success	total tokens	avg ms
oc open	6/6	1,936	540
oc raw	6/6	21,334	541
OpenAI computer use (screenshot floor)	6/6	4,590
Claude computer use (screenshot floor)	6/6	6,294	840
Browser Use (state message)	6/6	6,470	2,543
Jina Reader	6/6	16,402	636
lynx -dump	5/6	24,657	457
Playwright MCP (snapshot)	6/6	25,832	365
Playwright rendered HTML	6/6	101,361	730
Selenium rendered HTML	6/6	166,557	1,189
raw HTML fetch	6/6	177,685	406

The compact view hands the agent 3x fewer tokens than anything else on the board and 92x fewer than raw HTML. The nearest rivals are floors, not full reads: the computer-use rows price a single 1024x768 screenshot, one look at the top of the page, and Browser Use's state message drops most page text. Among methods that deliver the page content, the gap is 8x to Jina Reader and 13x to Playwright MCP's accessibility snapshot. oc was also the only cleaner to return real content on all six tasks: lynx and the naive fetcher hit a DuckDuckGo challenge, and Reddit served Jina its block page.

The end-to-end agent benchmark runs Claude Code headless (claude -p on claude-sonnet-5) on three live tasks, one web tool per session, and reads success, turns, tokens, and cost from its JSON output:

tool	success	total tokens	total cost USD	avg s
oc	3/3	291,938	0.20	11
lynx -dump	3/3	261,073	0.23	10
raw curl	2/3	236,852	0.16	27
Jina Reader	2/3	140,365	0.17	24
Playwright MCP	2/3	285,364	0.32	31

oc and lynx were the only tools the agent finished every task with, and oc did it on the fewest tokens and lowest cost of any full-success run. Failures are where the money goes: raw curl, Jina Reader, and Playwright MCP each burned their whole 13-turn budget on the Reddit task, roughly 400k tokens and twenty cents apiece, and returned nothing, while oc read the same thread in 4 turns. Totals include Claude Code's own per-session overhead, so compare rows, not absolutes. The benchmark repo has per-task numbers, methodology, and instructions for adding other tools and models.

Status

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.

Known limits, honestly: no JavaScript rendering yet, no sites behind logins yet, and pages behind hard bot challenges may still refuse the tool.

Contributors

• only-cli, creator and maintainer

License

MIT