# Show HN: Turning websites into micro CLIs for Claude Code to save on tokens

> Source: <https://github.com/only-cli/oc>
> Published: 2026-08-19 21:26:15+00:00

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.

``` bash
$ 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](/only-cli/oc/blob/main/llms.txt) is the short version.

```
npm install -g @only-cli/oc
```

Requires Node 20+. Requests impersonate Chrome via [impers](https://github.com/lexiforest/impers); falls back to native fetch if impers is unavailable.

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. Run`npx @only-cli/oc --help`

once 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](https://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.

```
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.

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](/only-cli/oc/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).

Full methodology, per-task numbers, and other agents/models live in [only-cli/benchmarks](https://github.com/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 |

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.

[only-cli](https://github.com/only-cli), creator and maintainer

MIT