| name | pi-defuddle |
| description | Convert any URL to clean Markdown instantly. Uses Defuddle for content extraction, falls back to pi-web-browse automatically on 403/bot-block. Use when: 'fetch this URL', 'convert to markdown', 'read this page', 'get article content', 'extract this URL'. |
pi-defuddle
Fetch any URL as clean Markdown. Fast (no browser). Auto-falls back to headless browser on 403/bot-block.
Usage
bun /Users/james/Repos/wibandwob-dos/extensions/pi-defuddle/defuddle.ts <url>
bun /Users/james/Repos/wibandwob-dos/extensions/pi-defuddle/defuddle.ts <url> --json
bun /Users/james/Repos/wibandwob-dos/extensions/pi-defuddle/defuddle.ts <url> --no-fallback
How it works — three-tier fallback chain
- Direct fetch + Defuddle (fast, no browser) — works for static/SSR pages
- pi-web-browse (headless Chromium extension) — if fetch fails (403/429) or page is a JS-rendered SPA (empty content)
- Playwright (globally-installed) — if pi-web-browse isn't installed or also fails. Launches headless Chromium, waits for JS to render, then pipes the rendered HTML back through Defuddle for clean markdown extraction
SPA detection: if direct fetch succeeds but Defuddle extracts zero words (wordCount=0), the page is likely JS-rendered and fallbacks are triggered automatically.
Use --no-fallback to skip tiers 2–3 and fail fast.
Playwright setup (one-time, optional)
npm i -g playwright && npx playwright install chromium
If Playwright is installed globally, it's found automatically. No project-level dependency needed.
Output
Markdown (default): # Title, byline, description, then article content.
JSON (--json): content, title, author, published, description, domain, wordCount, parseTime, extractorType.
Site-specific extractors
Defuddle has native extractors (better than generic Readability) for: GitHub, Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter/X, YouTube, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok.
Setup
The script is self-healing — if linkedom is missing it installs itself automatically on first run.
If that somehow fails, run this once from the repo root:
cd /Users/james/Repos/wibandwob-dos && bun add linkedom
linkedom lives in the repo root node_modules/ (not vendor/defuddle/). It only needs to be installed once per machine.
