Clify

clify: the web, rebuilt for agents

clify turns most websites into a JSON CLI and an MCP server: so far 156 public sites ship with verified commands (open data and government, developer registries, science, maps and weather, culture, news, sports, jobs). An agent explores the site once in a headless browser, records the requests behind what it clicks, writes a typed command for each, and tests every command live before keeping it. After that, agents call the site's own endpoints instead of clicking through pages: same answers, a fraction of the time, tokens and RAM. When a site needs an account, clify signs in with its own identity (email and phone) or with yours. When it hits a CAPTCHA, it stops and asks a human.

Replay of one live run (2026-10-18T09-57-57-642Z), sped up: the GIF starts at 0:17 on the race clock, once the browser has loaded its first page, and plays the 4× video at 4× again (16×). The same model (Claude Opus 5.5) does the same six jobs on five signed-in SaaS dashboards and a forum, once through a browser and once through clify with specs generated by clify add (5 of 6 CLIs generated; svix's robots.txt forbids exploring, so its spec is hand-written). This run: 4.0× faster, 7.3× cheaper. Over all 6 runs: 3.3× faster by mean time (288 s vs 87 s), paired per-run mean 3.5×; 7.3× cheaper by mean cost, paired 7.4×. Details below and in race/.

In numbers: 156 sites ship with 1,802 live-verified read commands in the CLI and hosted MCP, including a new U.S./San Francisco set for events, startup hiring, transit, listings, local news, public data and prediction markets.

Built for YC's *Make Something Agents Want* hackathon (Oct 17–18, 2026).

Use it with curl, nothing to install

The public agent API is at https://clify-dev.netlify.app. It needs no install, key, or account:

curl "https://clify-dev.netlify.app/search?q=SF+tech+events"

curl "https://clify-dev.netlify.app/luma/discover-events?city=San%20Francisco" curl "https://clify-dev.netlify.app/bart/get-departures?station=16TH"

Use /sites.json for the catalogue, /llms.txt for the full agent guide, and / .json for commands and verified example URLs. Task-specific entry points start with San Francisco and U.S. agent tasks, Luma events, YC startup jobs, BART departures, Craigslist SF listings, and DataSF. Finnish sites remain in the catalogue; their task pages are still available. Machine-readable discovery manifests are at /agent.json and /.well-known/webmcp.json.

Live demo: 6 browser agents vs 6 clify agents

Twelve Claude Code agents (Claude Opus 5.5) start at the same moment: on each of the six sites above, one works in a browser and one with clify, same prompt, same accounts. Every account was created by the agent itself with its own email. Each tile turns green when an independent check finds the object on the live site. Recorded live run of Oct 18, 08:58 PT: clify all 6 verified at 0:27.6 for $0.64; browser agents all 6 verified at 1:43.8 for $2.06. Run it yourself: race/bin/grid (on the machine with the sessions) or race/bin/mac-demo (from a laptop, over ssh); details in race/.

Try it in 10 seconds (hosted MCP, nothing to install)

claude mcp add --transport http clify https://bold-cloud-h4u6s.run.mcp-use.com/mcp

Then ask your agent something like *"latest serde version on crates.io and the NWS forecast for San Francisco"*. The server holds 156 sites and 1,802 live-verified commands behind 3 core tools (clify_sites, clify_help, clify_run) plus 4 direct shortcuts for popular commands; the whole tool list costs about 2.5k tokens instead of 569k (one tool per command), and the 3 core tools alone about 1.4k. Codex: codex mcp add clify --url https://bold-cloud-h4u6s.run.mcp-use.com/mcp. Read-only and public; write commands return a preview and need confirm: true. More in mcp/.

Or email the agent: send clify@fine-vale.primitive.email a question like *"latest tokio version and its downloads"*. The always-on clify agent runs it with clify on its own InstaBox and answers in your thread, usually within a minute (read-only public sites, 5 jobs per sender per day).

Is it alive? https://clify-agent-b3d326.inkboxwire.com/status: the agent's read-only status page (uptime, jobs today, last reply, model), served from its InstaBox at its Inkbox internet address.

Quickstart (local CLI)

Node 22+. clify is not on npm (npm i clify is an unrelated package): clone the repo. clify add and logins need Chromium; using a CLI needs nothing else.

git clone https://github.com/ToukoUrsin/clify && cd clify/clify

npm install npx playwright install chromium # for clify add, repair, login (or set CLIFY_CHROME) export PATH="$PWD/bin:$HOME/.clify/bin:$PATH"

clify list --query "SF events" # find a site: 156 verified site CLIs ship built in clify crates search-crates --q "http client" --sort downloads --limit 3 clify weather get-point --lat 37.77 --lon -122.42

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=... # model access, only for clify add / repair clify add https://metacpan.org/ # explore → generate → verify live → install (2–6 min typical, up to ~15 on big sites)

Every command prints one JSON object ({"ok":true,"count":N,"nextPage":...,"data":...}); errors carry next, the exact command to run next. clify mcp serves everything installed as a local MCP server. Agents should start at AGENTS.md, clify/AGENTS.md, llms.txt or clify guide.

Headline numbers

All runs are real, on live sites, with claude-opus-5-5. Ratios are clify vs a browser agent doing the same task with the same model and prompt.

"By mean" divides the browser's mean (clicks-only runs) by clify's mean (all runs); "paired" is the mean of the per-run ratios in the clicks-only runs, where both racers ran at the same moment. With generated specs the clify agent now makes as many model calls as with hand-written ones (16.8 vs 17 per run) and costs about the same ($0.28 vs $0.30): clify add fills the signed-in account's project/org/team ids in by itself and prints compact help (race/README.md, round 5). Both sets are published. Every number in this README is derived from its source files and checked by scripts/counts.mjs.

Versus an agent with curl

Same model, same prompts, the agent given curl, jq, python3, WebFetch and WebSearch instead of clify (no browser):

• Public read-only benchmark: curl wins. curl 40/40, 7.5 s / 10.2k tokens / $1.12 vs clify 40/40, 9.0 s / 16.5k / $1.28 (median time, median tokens, total cost). These sites have documented JSON APIs or are scraping sandboxes the model knows by heart, so curl usually answers in one call; clify reads its help first. bench/README.md
• Signed-in dashboards (race mode D, curl handed the same saved cookies and tokens as files): both 6/6, clify ahead. D 97 s / $0.52 vs clify 66 s / $0.29 in the same 2 runs (D 6/6 and clify 6/6 every run; paired: D 1.5× slower, 1.8× the cost). curl spends its extra calls re-discovering forms, CSRF fields and API paths in every run; on the public forum it beat clify. race/README.md (mode D)

So clify's value is not on sites whose API the model already knows. It is in the signed-in, undocumented parts: requests discovered once and verified by clify add instead of re-discovered every run, sessions kept in a vault (the login, signup and 2FA that produced the sessions D used were clify's), and account ids filled in. Most of the gap to a browser agent is the browser: curl with sessions is also 3× faster and 4× cheaper than clicking.

What's proven

• Most URLs → verified CLI. clify add on 44 public sites it had never seen: 41 (93%) ended with 3 or more live-verified commands, 514 verified in total, 2–6 minutes each, no human edits. The 3 misses are behind bot walls, which clify reports and does not get around. clify/proofs/sites.md. A second sweep of 116 more sites in Blaxel sandboxes brings it to 133 of 160 sites with 3+ verified commands and 1,634 verified commands (1,628 of them on those 133 sites, listed in wall.json; 6 more on 3 sites that stayed under 3); every miss is listed with its reason. 132 of the 133 ship built into clify (RubyGems' generated spec stays in proofs/sites/). clify/proofs/sites-blaxel.md
• Agents use it unaided. Fresh claude -p agents with Bash limited to clify solved 6/6 real tasks (handoff.md). Cold start: a fresh agent in an empty directory cloned this public tree, installed clify, ran clify add https://flathub.org/ itself (8 of 8 commands verified) and answered corr