ax web fetch

ax is the AI-era curl. It fetches a URL, discovers page structure, and extracts rows or tables in one command.

Why the kit ships it

Agents reach for curl and get nothing back on an empty body. Or they dump raw HTML into context and blow the token budget. Or they hand-roll regex over markup that breaks on the next page. ax replaces all three. It returns structured status and body, never goes silent, and caps output at 50 rows by default so a page cannot flood the window. The kit ships a matching ax skill so every agent knows the discover-then-extract workflow.

Cheatsheet

ax https://api.site.example/users                 # {status, ok, ms, headers, body}
ax https://api.site.example/x -H 'authorization: Bearer k' -X POST -d '{"a":1}'
ax https://site.example --outline                 # discover repeating structures
ax https://site.example --locate 'some text'      # find which selector holds text
ax https://site.example '.card' --count           # confirm a hypothesis
ax https://site.example '.card' --row 'title=a, href=a@href'
ax https://site.example 'table' --table --where 'Stars >= 30000'
ax https://docs.site.example/guide --md --budget 800

Fetch or --outline once, --locate or --count to confirm, then one --row or --table call. Repeat fetches of the same URL are cached for about two minutes, so probing is cheap. Every extraction prints N rows extracted on stderr, which is the verification.

Install

ax is pinned to v0.1.5 and vendored next to the skill so the agent instructions match the binary. install.sh installs it automatically into ~/.local/bin (override with AX_INSTALL_DIR), verifies the download against the published sha256 checksum, and skips when ax is already present. If you already had a different ax version installed, the installer keeps yours, so the skill-matches-binary guarantee only holds for the auto-installed pin. To install by hand, run curl -fsSL https://ax.yusuke.run/install | sh.

When not to use it

• JS-rendered SPAs. If ax reports a likely SPA, the data is not in the raw HTML, so switch to the browser tool.
• Local files and non-web work. Use your normal read and search tools.