Beyond Coding: Web & Research

Most agent workflows are not pure coding. You ask the agent to read a changelog, check an API spec, summarise an RFC, or pull the key points out of a long video. LeanCTX makes those “beyond coding” tasks first-class with one tool — ctx_url_read — that fetches a public web page, PDF, or YouTube video and returns it as compressed, citation-backed context instead of raw HTML pasted into the window.

Read a page, get clean text

The default auto mode extracts the main article, drops navigation and ads, and returns clean Markdown within a token budget:

ctx_url_read url="https://example.com/blog/whats-new"

You get the content the page is actually about — not its chrome — already distilled to fit the context window.

Extract claims you can cite

For research, raw prose is rarely what you want. The facts and quotes modes return discrete claims, each with a confidence score and the source URL it came from, so the agent can attribute every statement and you can verify it later. Add a query to focus extraction:

ctx_url_read url="https://example.com/api/docs" mode="facts" query="rate limits and quotas"

Each returned claim carries its source, which is exactly what you need when the agent writes a summary, a comparison, or a decision memo that has to be defensible.

PDFs and YouTube

The same tool handles more than HTML:

# A remote PDF (spec, paper, datasheet) → text
ctx_url_read url="https://example.com/paper.pdf" mode="text"

# A YouTube video → flattened transcript
ctx_url_read url="https://youtu.be/VIDEO" mode="transcript"

A talk, a tutorial, or a recorded standup becomes quotable text the agent can reason over.

Keep it in budget

A single documentation page can blow the context window. ctx_url_read distils the fetched content down to max_tokens (default 6000) with relevance-ranked, extractive compression, and max_items caps how many claims facts/quotes return (default 12):

ctx_url_read url="https://example.com/very-long-guide" max_tokens=3000 query="authentication"

You spend tokens on the part that answers the question, not the whole page.

Make it stick

Pair web research with memory so findings survive the session. Pull the facts, then remember the ones that matter:

ctx_url_read url="https://example.com/spec" mode="facts" query="breaking changes"
ctx_knowledge action=remember category=research content="v5 removes the legacy auth header — source: example.com/spec"

Now the next session recalls what you learned without re-fetching.

Safety

Fetching is SSRF-guarded: only http/https URLs are allowed, and requests to private, loopback and link-local addresses are blocked, so an agent cannot be steered into probing your internal network. Requests honour a timeout (timeout_secs, default 20, max 60).

Setup

ctx_url_read ships with the binary and is exposed automatically wherever LeanCTX runs as an MCP server — no extra configuration. If your agent is connected via the standard setup, the tool is already there; just call it. The full reference, every mode and more examples live on the Web & Research page.