#Why curl.md

Agents love the web. The web was not designed for them.

#The Problem curl.md is Solving

Coding agents need high-quality context to do useful work. The web should be perfect for that. It has documentation, changelogs, release notes, engineering blogs, and loads of other resources they can use.

But most webpages are terrible inputs for agents. HTML is noisy and token-heavy, JavaScript can change what renders, and page elements like navigation, sidebars, cookie banners, and scripts often make it difficult to extract the content that actually matter.

Markdown is a much better fit: plain text, structured, and easy for agents to process. Converting URLs to markdown isn’t trivial. That’s where curl.md comes in.

curl.md is built for developers and coding agents. It turns the web into agent-optimized markdown so you can ship faster, waste fewer tokens, and save money.

#Fits Right Into Your Workflow

curl.md is built around the common loop in developer and coding-agent workflows:

Fetch a URL from a prompt, doc, or search result
Pull the useful parts into the context window
Use that context to code, debug, or decide what to do next

Many agent tools already include built-in read_web_page or webfetch support. curl.md goes further for coding workflows:

Fetch markdown directly and shortcut HTML conversion with source-aware rules, Accept headers, and other optimizations.
Narrow long pages to an objective or pre-filter with keywords to extract only what matters and reduce tokens.
Read optimized markdown through curl.md by cleaning up syntax with markdown engineered especially for agents.

You can use all of this through the CLI, plugins, skills, and API & SDK, with caching built in.

#Save Money on Tokens

Coding agents are powerful, but they are not known for being token efficient. Their business is selling tokens, not reducing how many you use.

Pulling raw URLs into context is one of the fastest ways to burn tokens and bloat context. curl.md reduces that overhead by returning optimized markdown by default.

Features like objective-based narrowing reduce input tokens even further by returning only the content needed for the task.

curl.md also adds observability, so you can see how many tokens and how much money you are saving as an individual or across a team.

#Fully Open Source

curl.md is fully open source and not a black box platform. You (or your agent) can inspect the source, submit improvements, fork it, build on top of it, and do whatever you want with the code.

We welcome contributions from the community. See our Contributing Guide to get involved.

#Easy to Type, Easy to Remember

curl.md is short, memorable, and easy to use in prompts, terminals, and tools. It is also an homage to (we think) the greatest CLI tool of all time.

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