Releasing webctl, a CLI for token-efficient web search, powered by Jev

I ran out of Codex tokens last week, then ran out on my backup account. Same deal with Claude.

webctl is a smart web-search CLI for agents, backed by Jev. It saves a lot of tokens.

webctl search "final score san francisco giants september 19th baseball"

...or, more likely:

webctl "San Francisco giants MLB score recent games" \
  --goal "The user asked to know the final score of last night's (September 19th) San Francisco Giants game in Major League Baseball"

• Quick start
• Installation
• Schematics
• Usage

I originally built this to give my Pi/Kimi K3 chat stack something akin to what Claude/Codex already have out of the box, but now I have Claude/Codex using it too... and it's pretty freaking dope. It really saves a lot of the context window. So now it's free for all!

How it works¶

By default, webctl will try three web-search backends. Each result set is passed—with the original query and goal—to Jev for scoring; the high-scoring subset is then deduped by some fancy math (plus Jev). This means your Claude (or whatever) doesn't have to read as much junk, which saves you $$ (sorry, Anthropic!).

The snippets are usually enough. When they are not, and the agent would otherwise read a whole page, --scrape --filter-chunks is the cheaper move: webctl fetches the top results, parses out the textual content, divides it into chunks, and sends those chunks—plus the original query and goal—to Jev for scoring. Only the relevant chunks come back, so that is all that lands in the agent's context.

For long PDFs, Reddit/Stack Overflow comment threads, earnings transcripts, and entire Wikipedia articles, this saves an enormous number of tokens compared to reading the page. For a short fact, it adds nothing—see the benchmarks README.