only-cli

[00:00] This is only-cli. It is yet another project that claims to turn websites into a CLI for your agent. I know Vercel’s got one, Firecrawl definitely has one, and there’s a bunch of other ones floating out there and some are good. Most of them are trying to put their hands in your pocket. You know, you’ve got to get an API key or sign up for their service. This does none of that. It’s also very honest, or the developers of this project are very honest about its current status. It does content extraction. It does not currently do interaction, but apparently they are working on that. So we are going to jump in and take a look at only-cli and how it’s different from the other tools and where it really shines.

[00:48] This is the problem that only-cli is attempting to solve. So I’m going to hit this hacker news address and we are going to get back 34,834 characters. I can do the same thing with only-cli by going OC HN top and we get everything back. I’m going to tweak that. I’m going to add a tech V and that’s for verbose. And what’s going to happen same URL. What it’s telling me here is that we got about 1,137 tokens versus 8,705 tokens for the entire HTML. That’s navigation and ads and sidebars and all that stuff. So in this case, it saved us 87% in that transfer over the wire. So let’s dig into this guy.

[01:33] I’m going to say OC help. We get about 20 different commands here that we can use. And the one I’m going to jump into first is sites. So these are all pre-configured keywords that we can use for very specific sites. So the one we were looking at a second ago is OC hacker news. And I can say, give me the top. I don’t know if that’s the top 10 or whatever, but I’m getting all of those. And you can see rather than Jason, it’s giving me back these like line number items. So if I come up here to number one, I see it’s this name termination. I don’t know what that is. I’m going to say OC do one. So that literally means click on that thing. That’s in the number one position of the previous output. And it did. It went to whatever this name termination bit was.

[02:24] If we want to look at a GitHub repository, we’ve got a GH for GitHub, say repo. Then the owner and then the repository name. And we get everything back from the only-cli repository. Now, if we actually want Jason, we can do the exact same command and throw on the Jason flag. And now everything comes back as Jason. And if we actually want raw HTML, we can just say OC raw and just give it any URL. And it’ll work a lot like a bunch of other tools where it’ll give us that markdown formatted content based on whatever was at the actual URL.

[03:01] So in terms of content extraction, the CLI all by itself has parity with all of these guys. Like I said, the interaction is pretty weak. You can do links and you can do kind of like expand a very specific section of the content based on this numbering system. But as far as extraction, this thing is super easy to set up and super easy to use. So now we’re going to take a look at how we can integrate that with our agents.

[03:27] So I use skill gate to install the OC agent skill. For some reason, they call it web browsing CLI, but whatever, I’m not complaining and jump over here. I’m going to go into open code. I’m going to say use web browsing CLI to browse the top GitHub trending repositories and summarize the top three. And what you’ll see is it’s using the NPX version. So I didn’t even need to have the CLI installed before using it with my agent. And there we go. I have the top three trending repositories and at an 87% token savings, this is exactly what I want.

[04:09] It’s super easy to install. There’s no API keys. There’s no setting up MCPs or anything like that. This thing is dead simple to use and it’s highly effective. Check it out. Be sure to follow it. I’m sure this thing is going to grow quite a bit over the coming days.