fetch

/fetch -- Ad-hoc URL fetch with smart extraction

Pulls a URL's main content (title, description, body paragraphs) without the HTML boilerplate. Delegates to silo's smart-fetch MCP tool, which strips scripts/styles/nav/footer and targets <main> or <article> regions. Typical reduction: 80-99% vs raw HTML.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS

Expected: /fetch <url> [--mode auto|concise|full|meta-only] [--no-cache] [--privacy]

• --mode auto (default): tries concise extraction, falls back to full if quality degrades
• --mode concise: caps body at ~2KB
• --mode full: returns all extracted paragraphs
• --mode meta-only: only title + description (smallest)
• --no-cache: skip local cache read, force network fetch
• --privacy: don't write to cache (use for sensitive URLs)

When to use

• Quick reference: "what does this page say" — /fetch <url> beats opening a browser
• Before witnessing: peek at content before committing to /witness (which creates a claim)
• Third-party pages: docs sites, blog posts, research articles
• Re-reading: cache hits are ~1ms; great for iterating on content you've already fetched

When NOT to use

• Confluence: use /pull — structured API is better than HTML scraping
• DeepWiki: use /pull deepwiki — it already has a cleaner path
• Authenticated pages: smart-fetch doesn't do auth. Use farmer for approval-gated flows.
• PDFs, images, JSON: smart-fetch rejects non-HTML content types with unsupported-content-type

Instructions

1. Call mcp__silo__silo_smart-fetch with the URL and parsed flags.

1. If the response quality is "failed" (empty body, SPA, link list, HTTP error), tell the user:
2. What the reported quality was
3. Any warnings returned
4. Suggest retrying with --mode full or raw WebFetch as a fallback

1. Display the extracted content in a readable format:
2. Title, description
3. Full content (or first N lines if very long)
4. Size reduction metric and cache hit/miss status

1. Suggest next actions based on what the user seems to be doing:
2. If they're corroborating a claim: /witness <claim_id> <url> --smart
3. If they want to save findings: /research "<topic extracted from content>"
4. If the content was weak/failed: /fetch <url> --mode full or open in a browser

Example output

URL:        https://example.com/article
Quality:    high  |  Cached: no (first fetch)
Title:      "Understanding Smart Fetch"
Size:       142.1 KB -> 2.3 KB (98% reduction)
Mode used:  concise
Elapsed:    340ms

--- Content ---
[first 2KB of extracted main content]

Next steps:
  /witness r003 <url> --smart  -- corroborate a claim with this source
  /fetch <url> --mode full     -- get the full extracted body
  silo cache stats             -- see what's cached locally

Anti-rationalization

| Rationalization | Reality | |:---|:---| | "Smart-fetch lost content" | Check the quality field. If "failed", retry with --mode full. If "degraded", the site may be a SPA — content depends on JS execution. | | "I should always use full mode" | Full is fine for small pages but wasteful on long docs. auto handles the fallback for you. | | "Cached content might be stale" | Default TTL is 7 days. Use --no-cache for latest, or silo cache purge <domain> to drop specific entries. |