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

Only-CLI released oc, an open-source tool that turns websites into compact, numbered command-line interfaces for AI agents, cutting token usage from tens of thousands to a few hundred per page. The tool, installable via `npm install -g @only-cli/oc` and requiring Node 20+, works with agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity, and includes tuned shortcuts for sites such as Hacker News, GitHub, and Reddit.

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