What does only-cli do?

It fetches a web page, distills it into a compact text view with numbered actions, and lets an AI agent drive the site by number, with no per-site adapters, browser extension, or daemon.

How many tokens does it save?

Across four measured live-site tasks, oc open cost 1,444 tokens where a raw HTML fetch cost 65,372, about 45 times fewer.

How do I use only-cli with an AI coding agent?

Install the skill with npx skills add only-cli/oc, add one instruction to your agent configuration file, or run npx @only-cli/oc open with no setup.

Does only-cli work on JavaScript-only sites?

Not yet. only-cli reads mostly static pages, and some sites that look JavaScript-only work anyway because the server still ships the content as HTML, a feed, or inline data. A lazy headless fallback is on the roadmap.

What does only-cli cost?

Nothing. only-cli is MIT licensed and open source. It requires Node.js 20 or newer.

Browse the web in tokens, not pages.

Name: only-cli
Author: only-cli

A typical page is tens of thousands of tokens of markup. The signal on it fits in a few hundred. oc fetches the page, distills it into compact text with numbered actions, and lets an agent drive the site by number.

$ npm install -g @only-cli/oc

Node 20+. Three runtime dependencies. No daemon, browser extension, or per-site adapters. Or skip the install with npx @only-cli/oc.

Wire it into your agent Read the source

$ 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

1,444 tokens for four real pages, the same four cost 65,372 as raw HTML

45×

Fewer tokens than a raw HTML fetch

477

Tokens for a Reddit thread that was 52,899

500

Token budget per render, hard capped

Runtime dependencies, zero setup

Three ways in

Give your agent the web, cheaply

Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, or any shell-capable agent. Pick the setup that matches how you already work; each is one line.

Install through the skills directory into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Copilot. The skill costs almost no context until the agent invokes it.

$ npx skills add only-cli/oc

Prefer to do it by hand? Copy skills/only-cli/ into your agent's skills directory.

Add this instruction to CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, or your agent's equivalent configuration file.

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.

No install and no config. The tool teaches its command surface through --help, the actions: line on every render, and errors that name the next command.

$ npx @only-cli/oc open example.com

Command surface

Five commands, four flags

Small enough that an agent learns it from one --help and never asks again.

Command	What it does	Ships
`oc open <url>`	Fetch and render a page with numbered actions	v0.1
`oc do <n>`	Follow the numbered link [n] from the last page	v0.2
`oc find <query>`	Where a string appears on the page already open	v0.2
`oc next`	The next budget worth of the page already open	v0.2
`oc read <n>`	Full text of the region at [n]	v0.2
`oc raw [url]`	Distilled markdown of the whole page	v0.1
`oc <site> <verb>`	Site shortcut: 'oc hn top', 'oc wiki article Berlin'; 'oc sites' lists them	v0.4
`oc login`	Seed session cookies from stdin; 'oc logout' forgets them early	v0.5
`oc fill <n> <text>`	Type into a numbered input	Planned
`oc submit [n]`	Submit a form	Planned

Flags --budget <tokens>--json--html--session <name>--verbose Metrics are off by default, because metrics cost tokens too.

Benchmarks, measured 2026-08-19

The gap is clearest on a task with a few hops in it

Open r/ClaudeAI's front page, follow its top post to the comments, and report what the top comment argues, plus a single page, Yahoo Finance's AAPL quote. One live session per row, against each agent's own default tools.

Methodology + per-task numbers

Reddit, multi-hop

Setup	Answer	Tokens	Turns	Est. cost
`Codex + oc`	right	112,794	6	$0.07
`Codex default`	right	301,009	12	$0.18
`Claude Code + oc`	right	250,628	8	$0.15
`Claude default`	failed	196,675	7	$0.12

AAPL, single page

Setup	Answer	Tokens	Turns	Est. cost
`Codex + oc`	right	59,648	4	$0.04
`Claude default`	right	123,866	3	$0.08
`Claude Code + oc`	right	198,976	7	$0.12
`Codex default`	failed	71,947	4	$0.04

Claude Code's own WebFetch and WebSearch are blocked from reddit.com outright, and by default it has no shell to fall back to, so on the Reddit task it does not just cost more, it fails outright. Codex falls back to its own web search and curl, and gets there at 2.7× what it costs through oc. On the single AAPL page it flips: Codex's default never opens the page and reports a stale price, while Claude Code's default WebFetch is the cheapest correct answer in the table, cheaper than oc. A row marked failed didn't land a correct answer. The cost column is an estimate, not a measurement: they apply Claude Code's own measured rate on these runs (~$0.61 per 1,000 tokens, blended across input, output, and cache reads/writes) to every row's token count, including the two Codex rows, since the Codex CLI doesn't report a per-run dollar cost and its underlying model has no published price to fall back on. Treat those two as a stand-in, not gpt-5.6-sol's real pricing.

Works today

Any mostly-static site, no per-site setup

News, blogs, documentation, forums, and search engines: one generic engine distills whatever HTML comes back. Tuned shortcuts cover the sites agents hit most.

Site	Shortcuts
Hacker News	`top · new · item · user`
Reddit	`sub · new · top · post · user · search`
GitHub	`repo · user · search · trending · issues`
Stack Overflow	`search · question · tag · user · recent`
Wikipedia	`article · search · lang`
X	`user · post`
LinkedIn	`profile · company · jobs`
Yahoo Finance	`quote · news · history · lookup · markets`
YouTube	`video · channel`
DuckDuckGo	`search · lite`
Bing	`search · news`
AWS docs	`guide · page · cli · search`
Google Cloud docs	`docs · page · gcloud · search`
Microsoft Learn	`azure · doc · cli · dotnet · search`
Python docs	`library · doc · search`
MDN	`js · css · doc · search`
Node.js docs	`api · search`
Go (pkg.go.dev)	`pkg · search`
Rust docs	`std · doc · search`
Java docs	`api · search`
Ruby docs	`class · search`
PHP manual	`fn · doc · search`
TypeScript docs	`handbook · search`
cppreference	`cpp · c · search`

A site shortcut is a small JSON file; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Known limits, honestly

What it can't do yet

Pages that only render with JavaScriptPlanned

Sites with hard bot challenges may still refuse the toolOpen

v0.5 covers static pages, budget-aware rendering, site shortcuts (including eleven language documentation sets), Atom and RSS feeds, JSON API rendering, authenticated sessions, and proxy support. Requests impersonate Chrome, or Firefox where a site prefers it, and fall back to native fetch. MIT licensed; contributions welcome.

Practising what it preaches

This site is readable by the thing it is for

Every word is in the initial HTML, with no client-side rendering and one honest heading hierarchy. There is an llms.txt for orientation, an RSS feed, a sitemap, and structured data for crawlers.

Read /llms.txt Why HTML is the wrong input

$ oc open only-cli.com
# only-cli: browse in tokens, not pages
install: npm install -g @only-cli/oc
[1] For agents: three ways in
[2] Commands: five commands, four flags
[3] Benchmarks: 1,444 vs 65,372 tokens
[4] Blog: 19 posts
actions: do <n> | raw <url>

Writing

All posts →

4 Sep 2026 · Release

Browse the web in tokens, not pages.

Give your agent the web, cheaply

Five commands, four flags

The gap is clearest on a task with a few hops in it

Any mostly-static site, no per-site setup

What it can't do yet

This site is readable by the thing it is for

Writing

oc 0.5.3: Reddit through its feeds

oc 0.5.0: eleven language references and pages behind a login

Can your agent read Reddit?

WebSearch or WebFetch: which one should your agent use?

Stop paying for markup your agent throws away.