only-cli
51eea327b0
Trims the README to what a skimming user needs: it turns websites into a CLI for AI agents, saves tokens, and gets past blocks on some sites. Drops the repeated bar chart and three full result tables in favor of one small table and a link to only-cli/benchmarks, which already carries the full methodology and per-task numbers.
5.8 KiB
only-cli
Turns websites into a command line interface for AI agents. oc open <url> fetches a page and hands back a compact, numbered view instead of raw HTML or a screenshot, so agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity can browse without burning tokens. It also gets past blocks that stop naive fetchers on some sites, by talking to the page the way a real browser would.
$ oc open news.ycombinator.com
# Hacker News
[1] Show HN: I built a tiny CSV toolkit
[2] 312 comments
...
actions: do <n> | read <n> | next | raw
$ oc do 1
A typical page is tens of thousands of tokens of markup; the view above fits in a few hundred. No per-site adapters required, no browser extension, no daemon.
If you are an LLM reading this repository, llms.txt is the short version.
Install
npm install -g @only-cli/oc
Requires Node 20+. Requests impersonate Chrome via impers; falls back to native fetch if impers is unavailable.
For AI agents
Add one line to 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. Runnpx @only-cli/oc --helponce to learn the commands.
Claude Code users can install the skill instead: copy skills/only-cli/ into .claude/skills/, or run npx skills add only-cli/oc, which also works in Cursor, Codex, Copilot, and others via skills.sh.
No setup at all also works: npx @only-cli/oc runs without a global install, and teaches its own commands through --help and the actions: line on every render.
Commands
oc open <url> fetch and render a page with numbered actions
oc do <n> follow the numbered link [n], or read [n] if it is text
oc find <query> where a string appears on the page already open
oc read <n> full text of the region at [n], up to 2000 tokens
oc next the next budget worth of the page already open
oc raw [url] distilled markdown of the whole page
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), --session <name>, --verbose/-v (metrics on stderr, or export OC_VERBOSE=1).
oc open remembers the page it rendered in a JSON file per session under ~/.only-cli (override with OC_HOME), so oc do 3 follows [3] without the agent ever handling a URL. Pages longer than the budget say what they left out; oc find, oc read <n>, and oc next read the rest without refetching the page. The budget is a target rather than a hard cap: a page that would only run a little long is printed whole rather than cut, since one extra tool call costs far more than the tokens it would have saved.
Supported websites
Works on any mostly-static site with no per-site setup: news sites, blogs, documentation, forums, search engines. On top of that, clis/ ships tuned shortcuts for:
| website | domain | shortcuts |
|---|---|---|
| Hacker News | news.ycombinator.com | top, new, item <id>, user <name> |
| 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> |
| X | x.com | user <name>, post <id> |
| 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 |
| Yahoo Finance | finance.yahoo.com | quote <symbol>, news <symbol>, history <symbol>, lookup <query>, markets, gainers, losers, trending |
| YouTube | youtube.com | video <id>, channel <name> |
A few of these (X, Stack Overflow, YouTube) read pages that look login-gated or JS-only from the outside, by finding the server-rendered HTML, feed, or inline data the page already ships without a login. Not supported yet: pages that only render with JavaScript, sites behind logins, and sites with hard bot challenges that expose no feed.
Want a website on that list? Open a pull request, or an issue naming the site — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Benchmarks
Full methodology, per-task numbers, and other agents/models live in only-cli/benchmarks. The short version, measured against live sites across a news front page, a Reddit discussion, a search results page, and more:
| method | tokens for 6 real pages | notes |
|---|---|---|
oc open |
1,936 | only method that returned real content on every page |
| Jina Reader | 16,402 | blocked on the Reddit page |
| raw HTML fetch | 177,685 | blocked on the search page |
Status
Early. v0.1 covers static pages, budget-aware rendering, and offline tests. Sessions, oc do <n>, oc find <query>, oc read <n>, and oc next are in, the rest of the actions (fill, submit, back) land in v0.2, and a lazy headless fallback for script-heavy pages in v0.3.
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